If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you’ll have noticed the Giants’ stuff being a frequent occurrence here. I like their music a lot, to put it simply. 1992 marked the year that John Linnell and John Flansburgh had been playing together as the band known as They Might Be Giants for a decade. And in the same year they released Apollo 18, the second under their major-label contract with Elektra and their first self-produced record. Out of the first four albums which saw the two Johns performing everything except the rhythm section, Apollo 18 is the one sounding the most like a full rock band playing together. A bit of a precursor to what would arrive on their next album, when they actually did become a full rock band. But to cap Flansburgh and Linnell’s studio material as a duo off, they close out Apollo 18 with ‘Space Suit’, a reworking of the very first song the two made together when they created the band in 1982.

Things get a little bit hectic nearing the end of the album. One of the most notable moments on it comes in the ‘Fingertips’ suite, a collection of 21 little snippets of choruses and musical segments inspired by the jingles that play in the background of infomercials. That suite ends with the minute-long ‘I Walk Along Darkened Corridors’, which is played out to be the dramatic closer of the piece with Linnell putting on a faux-operatic voice alongside an emphatic “organ” and clarinets. But then ‘Space Suit’ comes along to properly end things in the form of a swinging, suitably spacey, 6/8-time instrumental, emphasising the ‘one man on guitar, one man on accordion’ setup the band originated with all those years prior.

John Flansburgh once had a guitar teacher in the early ’80s named Jack DeSalvo, who taught him a bunch of chords to use whenever convenient. With the chords he learned, Flansburgh went on to write ‘Space Suit’, but with its jazzy origins, it was originally titled ‘I’ll Remember 3rd Street’. The recording of the ‘3rd Street’ demo can be heard below. Much, much different from how it would turn out some years later. I can simply describe ‘Space Suit’ as an instrumental that consists of two parts, the one that has that ascending scale and the other containing the main melody, played by John Linnell’s accordion for the first time and then accompanied by Flansburgh’s vocals (buried deep in the mix) second time round. Makes it sound like the accordion itself is singing. Really enjoy when those cymbal crashes pack an extra punch about 40 seconds in. Put these all together, makes for some good listening.