An early indie album, They Might Be Giants' debut was part of the same splatter of invention, disciplined by a feeling for ideas running their natural distance and no more (three minutes good, 30 seconds better), which produced Flood and the hit Birdhouse in Your Soul. It's a maze of all-American surrealism and absurdist satire, coated with cunning pop-like sugar on a pill of uncertain chemical composition. Some songs are just daft jokes: the trick of "Number 3" is that "There are just two songs in me and I just wrote the third", while "32 Footsteps" worries about things coming in 32s (which they don't, of course). However, "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head" bops out shrewd sociology. A factory closes: it's sad, but the bitter moment creates a romantic dream of the good old days when the place had probably been a hellhole. Though some may choke on the Giants' self-consciously nerdy pose, a group who can achieve feats of compression like that while retaining their light touch are crafts persons to be reckoned with. ***


Ever wondered what happened to all those squeaky clean Yank TV kids from the Sixties who, day in day out, scanned the box for their favourite snippets of trash culture? Well, some went on to join the State Department, and others (two others to be precise) went on to form They Might Be Giants. All those sickly TV progs like Mr. Ed, Howdy Doody, Bewitched, they all rear their ugly visogs on this splendid piece of vinyl.

They Might Be Giants, then, is a dynamic, confused, disparate, colourful and utterly brilliant hunk of lunacy. Messrs Flansburgh and Linnell treat their debut album as a roller coaster ride through what seems to be a junked out infancy. With titles such as "I Hope I Get Old Before I Die" and "Youth Culture Killed My dog," they strike an amazing resemblance to those other acid brains, Half Man Half Biscuit. Check this out for a couple, "Never would he worry/He'd just run and fetch the ball/But the hiphop and the white funk just blew away my puppy's mind." Weird and truly wonderful, man. ****1/2


Funny Peculiar
They Might Be Giants are the year's most unlikely and most pleasing success story. An intelligent, wacky Yank post-punk duo, their success with the single "Birdhouse in Your Soul" took their cult following and their record company by surprise.

They Might Be Giants was their debut LP, released in 1986 on the tiny Bar-None Records--and little here would have pointed to future stardom. Admittedly, anyone owning their current LP, Flood, will find similar lyrical and musical themes, and although the production is less than lavish, John Linnell (accordion, vocals, etc) and John Flansburgh (guitar, vocals, etc) are constantly fascinating in their quirky multi-instrumentalism.

The recently re-released "Don't Let's Start" is the best pop song here, but there are plenty of tunes to merit repeated listening. And then there are the one-liners, the bizarre truisms which attracted their cult following in the first place. This album's littered with them, and each play reveals hidden barbs and wry observations. "I Hope That I Get Old Before I Get Old" [sic] is a belated riposte to The Who's "My Generation," an anti-rock anthem with lines like "I'll think about the dirt I'll be wearing as a shirt."

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