Tag Archives: they might be giants

#1194: They Might Be Giants – She’s an Angel

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Well, I think I can simply say that I heard ‘She’s an Angel’ for the first time when I downloaded They Might Be Giants’ debut album on the old computer and listened through that, all the way back in the early months of 2011. Or maybe it was the later months of 2010. Either one. I know it was around that time that I decided to really explore TMBG’s discography. Having frequented This Might Be a Wiki for years before then and witnessed ‘She’s an Angel’ being a mainstay in the top five best TMBG songs as rated by users of the site, listening through the first album would finally give me the opportunity to see what the fuss was all about. I could have easily gone onto YouTube or something and just listened to it by itself. But I wanted that whole album experience.

The song is from the told from the perspective of a person who feels they might have fallen for a lady who might just be perfect and is having a bit of an internal crisis about it. The narrator asks questions how this could have happened. They think someone must have sent her. If so, why her over anyone else? “Surely, this doesn’t happen to anyone else.” I don’t want to type out the whole pre-chorus here, but that’s the part of the song where all these questions and feelings happen. And now that this narrator has found this person, does that mean they now have to do anything in order to keep them around? Like that old hypothetical, “If I jumped off a cliff, would you do the same?” But in this song’s case, it’s a building.

You know, before just now, I thought this track was sweet and earnest, but I think I’ve just recognised the hint of paranoia and anxiety behind the lyrics too. John Linnell, the vocalist and song’s writer, refers to a ‘they’ numerous times throughout. But who is ‘they’? The ‘they’ apparently sent this woman to cause the narrator this distress, and now that the narrator has realized the lady’s an angel, ‘they’ might have to do something to the narrator so the word doesn’t get out. A 1984-ish thing going on. But you as a listener wouldn’t think it. As soon as those slide guitars come in on the first pre-chorus, giving a floaty feel that instantly lifts the song’s mood, any sort of questioning you may have goes out of the window. I’ve always enjoyed Linnell’s vocal take on here too. I like the sort of portrayed awkwardness with the trail off the “I’m worried that something might happen to me if anyone ever finds… out” line. I enjoy how he hams up the “Why? Why did they send her” on the second pre-chorus. It’s all very dry and understated, but very impactful. TMBG’s first album is quite off the wall, something that I truly enjoy about it, but it’s nice that ‘She’s an Angel’ exists to reel things in for the few moments it lasts for.

#1184: They Might Be Giants – Shape Shifter

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In preparation for the release of They Might Be Giants’s BOOK album in 2021 – or because it had just been released, I can’t quite recall – I went ahead and listened through the band’s whole discography via Spotify. Missing out the children’s albums in the process, though. Now, TMBG’s one of my favourite ever groups, there are so many posts on here for songs by the band that back that up, so a lot of their albums I knew front to back already. But that wasn’t the case when it came to their 2016 album, Phone Power. That was the one record of theirs that I had never heard in full before. 2021 was the year to change this.

Back in 2015, TMBG revived their Dial-a-Song project – which initially existed in the ’80s as a literal thing where you could dial a number and new/old/in-the-works They Might Be Giants song would play through the phone speaker. But now this was the 21st century. But now there was a website and phone apps where you could easily access the stuff, and the band announced that a new song would be released every week throughout the year. ‘Shape Shifter’ arrived as the 52nd and last song in the “new” service, being provided to the masses on the 28th December 2015. The majority of the tracks were then compiled into three albums, Glean, Why?, and the aforementioned Phone Power, where ‘Shape Shifter’ can be found as the 15th track. The album isn’t a favourite of mine, by any means. It does sort of feel like a compilation rather than an album that was properly thought out. But ‘Shape Shifter’ was a hit to me from the jump.

The track has this grand showtune atmosphere about it, introduced by these processed John Linnell harmonies leading into the verses where he then adopts this more loungey, crooning tone to his vocal. The track concerns a person witnessing people and objects changing all around them. It may be a whole big metaphor about not being able to keep up with the times while people, technology, nature, whatever is constantly evolving. Or it’s literally about a man disturbed by his clarinet turning into a purple tentacle. It’s all entertaining stuff. I think the only irk I have about the track is that it could sound so much larger than it does. The horns that come in near the end are clearly synthesized. And I feel like the use of an actual brass section would have been amazing. And those Linnell harmonies I mentioned before could sound so much wider, have more of a booming presence. But hey, what do I know? The way it is, I’ll take it any day of the week.

#1171: They Might Be Giants – See the Constellation

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Apollo 18‘s one of my favourites out of the first four They Might Be Giants albums, which consisted of just John Flansburgh and John Linnell backed by a synthesized rhythm section while the two handled their respective guitar and accordion. It’s got a real rocking feel throughout, with the usual fake drums and bass sounding much less so than they did in albums before. Plus, the theme of space is very much reinforced by the packaging, the LP’s title and a few of the songs on there. Makes it feel quite complete in that regard.

‘See the Constellation’ is one of those numbers that lean into the whole space theme the album has going for itself and might just be one of the harder, pepped-up rockers the band have in their whole discography. Quite psychedelic too. Starting off with a guitar riff paying homage to The Monkees’ ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, the track soldiers on with a smacking snare drum punctuated by chopped up samples of Dee Dee Ramone doing count-ins for Ramones songs. Tremolo’d guitars come in during instrumental breaks, there are these twangy synth sitar strums that arrive in the mix too. The psychedelia is laid on thick. But it works tremendously well.

Lyrically, there’s not a lot of fat to chew, but the imagery’s very nice. The first verse is directly inspired by a promotional photo of an artist who was on the same label as the Giants at the time. The second is a short snippet of a memory of the narrator trying to look up at the sky past the city lights. And the third and final verse seems to come from the constellation itself, the guy made of dots and lines, the figure to whom which the whole song is dedicated. John Flansburgh signs off with the psychedelic question, “Can you hear what I see in the sky?” And after a moment of calm, with Dee Dee Ramone still chirping at the back, the track blasts off with an explosive instrumental coda that trails off into the night. This is a very fun one. And there’s more to come from this album in the future.

#1154: They Might Be Giants – Santa’s Beard

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Ah, the first They Might Be Giants song to appear in the ‘S’ section. An appearance by the group was bound to happen at some point. They’ve occurred in almost every other letter. One of my favourite bands. Appreciated their music for a long time. It’s a story I’ve told in nearly all the other TMBG posts that have come before, so to not sound like a broken record those previous two sentences make up the summary. The band’s album Lincoln, their second, released in 1988, is one I got to know fairly well once hearing it in full for the first time in late 2010 or so. It contains a few of John Linnell and John Flansburgh’s highly adored compositions. You get ‘Ana Ng’. You get ‘Cowtown’. It also contains ‘Santa’s Beard’, which I’m not sure is as rated among TMBG fans. But I like it. So here it is.

What the track is, is essentially a twisted take on that old song ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’. Replace ‘Mommy’ with ‘My Wife’ and you’ve got the message. I feel the lyrical content is the main reason why the song is currently ranked #737 out of 1010 on TMBG’s fanmade Wikipedia site. I guess you can never really be in the right frame of mind to hear a song about a man being cuckolded by jolly old Saint Nick. But it’s just a song and obviously nothing to take very seriously. It’s a harmless bit of fun, a sub 2-minute power pop tune with rollicking guitars, spindly keyboards and a synthetic slap-bass that makes its presence felt within the mix all throughout.

Well, I guess all that’s left to talk about is John Flansburgh’s vocal. He does sing this one really well, got that gritty rocker feel to his delivery. He could really get some power on those notes in those earlier years, and ‘Santa’s Beard’ is a good showcase of it. Especially on those ‘breaking up my hooooome’ lines in the choruses, and particularly at the end where he holds that ‘home’ out for longer, with the word transforming into a growling tone that disappears in the exploding final chord. Or penultimate chord that’s then followed up by the final beat that properly closes the song out. Yep, yep. It’s some good listening. Maybe not so substantial in the running of the album, depending on who you ask. But it’s a guaranteed good time whenever this one comes on.

#1123: They Might Be Giants – Rhythm Section Want Ad

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They Might Be Giants’ first album from 1986 is my personal favourite by the band. It’s not like the debut is where they peaked and everything else that followed paled in comparison. It’s just that the record very much shows the two Johns at their most eccentric, kind of brash and unapologetically unconventional, before they dialled things down a bit and went for a more warmer tone on their sophomore effort. The most avid TMBG fan will tell you that even though the first album is great, its second half may just get a bit too strange for its own good. I’m all for it, though. Tracks like ‘Chess Piece Face’, ‘I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die‘ and ‘The Day’, as unique as they are, wouldn’t be ones to bust out at the social gathering. You’ll get to the album’s last track and you’ll think, “Well, after all that, how could this record possibly close out?” It does so with one of the band’s greatest songs in their whole discography.

Before co-founding TMBG, John Linnell performed as a keyboard player in a short-lived new wave band The Mundanes. You can see him here, usually in the peripheral area when the camera is focusing on the guitarists or lead singer Marsha Armitage. Linnell left that band to form a new one with his good friend John Flansburgh, and with this exciting new venture was inspired to write a lyric acting as something of a mission statement. According to Linnell’s former bandmate John Andrews (another John), Linnell spontaneously started singing it one day while they were working together – not too long after forming TMBG. So here the Giants were, a new band for the 1980s, a musical duo consisting of an accordion player and a guitar player, no drummer, no bassist. But surely no band could be a band without a rhythm section, right? Well, no. And Linnell and Flansburgh were here to show you how it could be done.

Alongside the mission statement aspect of the song, the lyric reads as a big tribute to the ’80s in general, albeit with some witty remarks on how artists and musicians would usually get the short end of the stick. Like how poets and their fans will come together across the street from a corporate office where the real ‘pros’ are working.But Linnell says tells us to forget about ‘the man’, shouting out MDC and Menudo, Eurythmics (who, as it says in the lyric, someone thought the two Johns must be into – that wasn’t the case), general bands with girl lead singers… It’s a call out to the styles of the era, where people could use hats as megaphones, or have hairstyles made of bones. Seems like anything could be done in the ’80s. And now here were They Might Be Giants, a new band to add to the melting pot. Linnell embarks on a rapid-fire vocal delivery, matching the bustling/blistering pace of the music and making for one of his most engaging vocal takes. Expressive as ever, each lyric he provides appears to possess a different melody, rising and falling constantly before leaping to a height for the title mentions and eventually culminating in the track’s final word. It’s such a damn fun song. A damn fun song to close out a damn fun album. It couldn’t have gone any better.