Over the past few years, They Might Be Giants made such a smooth transition to children's rock that one would speculate becoming Raffi for the hipster-parent set was their ultimate destiny all along. But reducing their legacy to Wiggles-alternatives does injustice to a now quarter-century (!!!) run that has snaked its way through a variety of phases: sampler pranksters, full-band genre decathletes, frightfully prolific TV soundtrackers, and meta-lit accompaniment. Poll any segment of music fandom on their favorite TMBG era (we've all got one, don't even deny it), and the tallest bar will inevitably fall in the region of Lincoln > Apollo 18. It's no great mystery why; as with most bands, this early era contained all the seeds of the above-listed later TMBG phases in relatively equal amounts.
But one seed apparently fell on rocky ground, being somewhat neglected as the Johns got a real band and bigger ambitions: The band's long-forgotten post-punk upbringing. Gasp if you must, but don't forget they started in 1982 and that early singles "Don't Let's Start" and "Ana Ng" could almost pass for the twitchy, catchy work of crit-faves like the dB's or the Feelies, bands too high on dork factor to have fit into the more fashionable environs of post-punk's cool cousin new-wave. No, really, listen to them again.
Fortunately, as Johns Linnell and Flansburgh go somewhat gracefully into their middle ages, they seem to be recalling some of those tighter, tauter early days, when they were closer to Devo than Elmo. The creepy Marcel Dzama art of The Else would suggest so, as would the wonderfully stiff beat of "I'm Impressed", an anthem for beta-males with music as nervous as its message, not jokingly wrapped in big rock production like so much latter-day TMBG. That one's a Linnell, but Flansburgh is usually the one game for a power-pop throwback a la "Twisting", throwing together barre chords with some self-entertaining clever lyrics for the simple charms of "The Shadow Government" and "Feign Amnesia".
Oh, but if only they had stopped there. For a band that could probably deal with a mild break from ambition, recruiting the Dust Brothers as producers is not a promising sign, though their presence isn't as blatant as it could have been. The fuzz-bass backbeat on "Take Out the Trash" may sound a bit like Odelay, but Flansburgh's (hopefully) unintentional biting of Smash Mouth is what ultimately sinks the song. And surely the siblings Dust can't be blamed for the train wreck that is "With the Dark", some sort of mini-epic, maybe about pirates, that can't stay in one genre for more than 20 seconds.
As is becoming more and more common, TMBG are failed by their soft spot for musical humor and gimmickry, tendencies they used to keep in fine balance, but which have increasingly gotten away from them as their palette got wider. I mean, Christ, I'm a neurobiologist, and even I only got a one-time chuckle out of "Contrecoup", which filters a love song through traumatic brain injury terminology. Same goes for "The Mesopotamians" and "Bee of the Bird of the Moth", songs with words like "mesopotamish" and "bugness" that don't help the cause of anyone arguing that the band is more than a (particularly long-lived) novelty act.
Perhaps TMBG are just happier making kid's music-- even when they try to grapple with adult situations on "Upside Down Frown" or "Climbing Up the Walls" it still comes out G-rated. Or maybe they just like being in a child's ideal of a rock band, with their addictions to needless guitar solos and brass parts, long overdue for an intervention. But if they could just concentrate on what it was like to be young, but not that young, for longer than the 2:39 of "I'm Impressed", they could remind people that they were once more than just licensing geniuses and rugrat headliners, they were nervy, high-strung, geek-rock kings. I don't want the world, I just want that half.