The new They Might Be Giants album, The Spine, is actually good. That's a pleasant surprise because the value of each TMBG album has gone down since John Henry.*
Stylistically the Johns have moved from Rhythm Section Want Ad to the theme from Malcolm in the Middle, the Casio geek rock replaced with the incidental music proficiency of various styles in support of a feeling. They're at their best when they're telling a story with song; if they were born earlier in the century they would be masters of the musical (versus just one, anyway). You can hear that on The Spine, which features quick rock like "It's Kickin' In" to new TMBG standards like "Experimental Film."
While some songs are wry, The Spine isn't as depressing as Mink Car with its songs about vehicular homicide and paraplegism. With no No! to absorb the happy ideas, there are plenty of upbeat songs.
* Partly it's been depressing song content (Mink Car especially and No! excepted) and their focus split into too many projects leading to shovelware (the mp3 album from emusic, Long Tall Weekend, comes to mind, as it's the bulk of They Got Lost and included a better version of a song that ended up on Mink Car). I thought partly it might be the shorter song length. Many songs on recent releases like Working For The Man EP and The Spine are very, very short. While there's no simple correlation, these charts show unevenness in the ratio of song to album length:
While Factory Showroom, the album immediately following John Henry, has the longest songs, it's their shortest album at a scant 13 tracks, a local minimum of album length. Recently and specifically with The Spine, the ratio is steadier like their first albums.
(Thanks to foobar2000 for making it easy to copy this data in regexable format.)
