A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants is the band's fifth retrospective, following Miscellaneous T (1991), Then: The Earlier Years (1997), Best of the Early Years (1999), and Dial-a-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants (2002). Does the world really need another summation of Johns Flansburgh and Linnell's career? Actually, yes. User's Guide has a few advantages over its predecessors: by benefit of its timing, it's much broader and perhaps more representative of their two decades of prodigious output. Furthermore, by virtue of its defining concept, it avoids the obvious chronological presentation of singles and shoulda-been hits in favor of a much more playful overview whose organization reflects the Johns' guiding whimsy.
Song length-- not history or popularity-- informs the order of the generous tracklist. Beginning with the 47 seconds of "Minimum Wage", the tracks get increasingly lengthy, peaking with the 12th song, "Guitar", which clocks in at nearly four minutes; the remaining tracks get progressively shorter until the 51-second "Spider" closes the compilation out. The packaging cleverly plays out this highly ordered approach: the sleeve contains "A Fairly Complete List of They Might Be Giants Gigs Since 1985*" ("*1982-84 have yet to be documented") along with a timeline, a list of presidents mentioned over two decades, and a "comparison chart of personal pronouns in TMBG song titles." The cover art is derived from the UPC bar code, which expands to dominate the cover art and purports to measure melody, fidelity, and quantity. It's a sly reversal of the typical best-of aesthetic. Instead of presenting disparate material as a holistic statement of artistic intent and accomplishment, User's Guide explicitly acknowledges its commercial aims: These 29 songs are simply subjects from which variable data can be gathered, analyzed, and graphed. And sold.
While there are some curious omissions (where's "(She Was a) Hotel Detective"?), the tracklist proves that Flansburgh and Linnell never lost their gifts for quirky and complex pop hooks, as evidenced by late-career highlights like "Cyclops Rock" and "Doctor Worm". However, songs like "James K. Polk" reveal a tendency toward humorless overliteralization of history; "Meet James Ensor" and the subtext-heavy "Purple Toupee", on the other hand, exposes a tendency toward the opposite.
However, a statistical analysis reveals more than just the band's prolificity and diversity of output. User's Guide collects five tracks from the well-selling Flood (1990); four from Apollo 18 (1992); and three songs each from the band's self-titled debut (1986) and breakthrough Lincoln (1988), as well as from their recent children's album No! (2002). All in all, 18 of the 29 tracks date from the period 1985-1994, whereas only 11 are from 1995-2004/5; TMBG cull more tracks from the fewer albums in 1985-1994 and fewer tracks from the greater number of albums in 1995-2004/5.
While these figures may seem slightly tedious presented here, they prove scientifically what many listeners have long asserted, at least beginning with Apollo 18-- the first decade of They Might Be Giants' career produced an abundance of quality material (see: "Ana Ng" and "She's an Angel"), but the second decade of their career has seen an appreciable decline in that quality (see: "Boss of Me" and "James K. Polk"). This slippage could be attributed to the mid-90s post-grunge hostility to levity and quirk or perhaps to They Might Be Giants' transformation from a duo into a full band, which expanded their range beyond their charm. That's only subjective speculation, though. User's Guide seems to be an honest acknowledgement of the band's falterings as well as an implicit promise to keep playing around.