Holy fuckballs it’s new year’s already. Right then: time to get too excited about tonight’s plans. Get too drunk, too fast and miss the whole thing.
I’ll try to contain my enthousiasm here, cause I am very much aware that most of you aren’t all that much into comics/graphic novels. But this is unironically “Da bomb”. Scott Pilgrim meets Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and throw some dark fantasy in there, that approximates the awesomeness that is Phonogram.
The writing is ridiculously dense with references to anything from The Smiths to X-Ray Spex. And if you’re not familiar with the inner workings of say Britpop or Riot Grrl you’re pretty lost until you read it for the second or third time around (The glossary at the end is quite helpful, not to mention funnier than the Heinz Automato)
The amount of bands mentioned is overwhelming and for a curious person such as myself I’ve hardly found the time to check out everything these gods of pop-music have presented me. As an initial effort I compiled this Spotify playlist with most of the things that I had never heard about and some things I had heard about, but nowhere near enough. If you don’t have spotify: 1) Get it. 2) Here’s Common People. Consider it a consolation priz.
Well, I guess it’s sort of released now.
In a way.
Fuck it! New Dodos!
Wasn’t feeling too alert when I was waking up today.
Then someone told me The Crackups’ album was out.
Well… that’s that problem solved…
Straight up, no nonsense, ridiculous and loud. It’s everything a punk album should be, everything not just turned up to eleven, but to twelve. It doens’t so much kick your ass as it mercilessly annihilates your butthole. If I was a lesser man I’d type this entire review in ALL CAPS cause that’s how hyped up I am now. In a few months/years time, they’ll be looking for songs to score Cranked 3, and I couldn’t think of anything else more fitting. It truly feels like repeatedly getting punched in the face by a squirrel with severe ADD. (And I count that as a good thing)
As for the lyrics are honest, rude as fuck and just straight up ridiculous, not to mention twice as entertaining because the lead singer’s english isn’t all that great. Covering a wide variety of subject, such as not having sex with women with facial hair, teenage alcohol abuse, the negative sides of full time employment and we find out what exactly girls are for. A true educational journey, this.
Try it. It takes about half an hour to listen to the whole thing, and it’s definitely worth it.
Little embarassed. Only started listening to them… well, recently (last month, really), even though they’ve been around for a gazjilion (19) years. So I’m making up for it by granting upon the internet this totally superflous list of They Might Be Giants songs that I (and possibly you) should’ve checked out earlier:
Spoiler Alert
Where it all started. My friend Glenn posted this on my facebook wall, dooming me to having this tune stuck in my head for about a week.
This SHOULD have been the incentive to keep searching for new songs but I think their staggering amount of albums kind of prevented me from checking them out any further. Kind of how there’s 2 and a half straight DAYS of The Wire I could get in to is both exciting and demotivating.
Boss Of Me
Holy Malcolm In The Middle, Batman! That’s THEIR song?
I’m gonna be honest with you here: this song mostly made the cut because of the damn near infinite amount of Nostalgia points.
Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas)
This, my friends, is the pure definition of that vilest of portmanteaus: edutainment.
Taking astro-physics (well-known to be the least convertable-to-song branch of science) and turning it into one of the catchiest motherflippin songs I’ve heard in a long time is nothing short of a god-like achievement. And turns out they’ve been doing this for a while
Absolute best part of this is: When they turned out to be wrong about the whole gas thing, they just wrote another song, clarifying the situation.
Don’t Let’s Start
My thoughts exactly…. Great song though.
Dr Worm
If you’re not Airdrumming/Airguitaring/Generally-feeling-awesome through most of this song: You’re doing something wrong.
Birdhouse In Your Soul
This song… Oh god this song. It’s been so ferociously stuck in my head that I’ve found myself just randomly singing ‘WHO WATCHES OOOOVER YOOOOU’ in the street. Needless to say this resulted in weird looks, ruined reputations and one local supermarket I won’t be visiting again any time soon…
I am fully aware, yes, that this is their most popular song, and my big finale is somewhat dampened by the fact that most of you have already heard this a million times: well then tough titties. This song is indestructably awesome and you shall have to listen to it again.
To me it just embodies everything They Might Be Giants is great at: Simple but wonderful melodies and dreamy, somewhat abstract lyrics that, once I started paying attention to them astounded 7 kinds of shit out of me. I mean it’s about a friggin Night-lite. And it’s amazing! I mean that lighthouse verse alone blew my mind.
So yeah. They Might Be Giants. If you’re as new to this as I was I’ll give you a second here to pick the bits of brain from the floor cause I have clearly BLOW.YOUR.MIND.
It’s snoop dogg’s birthday today (dude’s turning 40, damn).
Anyway: Fridge favourite Psycho 44 covered the FUCK out of one of his tracks.
Yeah.. Blew me away to.
You can download it on soundcloud, and you should.
BONUS: As you may or may not know, Psycho 44 is working on their (its?) debut album. This little (but poorly recorded) gem will probably be on it. I’m so psyched.
(get it? with the… do you see what I did?)
