It’s been 40 years since They Might Be Giants released their debut album. While the duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have made plenty of changes in their working methods and instrumentation over the decades, their core philosophy seems to have remained unaltered. They combine catchy melodies and big hooks with whatever bizarre musical ideas they want to explore. Sometimes this happens within the same song, but often they get separated into big crowd-pleasers and oddball excursions.
Their latest album, The World Is to Dig, opens with a one-two punch that perfectly encapsulates this aesthetic. “Back in Los Angeles” finds Linnell declaring, “It’s great to be back in Los Angeles” over a muted 1960s-style crooner song. Linnell doesn’t quite have the voice to pull off a Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, but the music tries its best. Strings, jazzy bass, and electric piano give the song a relaxed, late-night feel, while drummer Marty Beller gets to play almost exclusively insane fills throughout the verses.
Linnell’s lyrics, though, imagine a sort of alternate universe Los Angeles, filling the song with locations and people that do not exist. Who can forget the Lonesome Clapping Seal or the delicious Fred Fries at the famous Stand on One Leg? He concludes the chorus by saying, ‘I don’t remember anything / Anything at all.” That seems to imply that it’s not actually a cracked mirror in Los Angeles, but yet another in a long line of Linnell’s addled narrators who have had a break with reality.
Immediately after this, though, Linnell puts listeners back on familiar ground with the huge hooks of “Wu Tang”. Except it’s maybe not familiar ground because he’s obliquely talking about the famous hip-hop collective in the form of a big, bright power pop song that has nothing at all in common with Wu-Tang’s sound. From the number of times Linnell repeats the words “Wu Tang” in the song, one suspects he just really enjoyed the way the phrase sounded. The song climaxes with a triumphant chorus where the words “Wu Tang” are extended over a full 16 beats, stretching out nearly forever.
From there, the record is off and running, with 18 tracks of They Might Be Giants‘ usual combination of weirdness and catchiness. Flansburgh’s “Outside Brain” is short and punchy, sounding very much like it would be a kids’ song if the band were still making music for children. It has chunky guitar riffs, pounding snare drum, and Flansburgh essentially narrating an action sequence, “From a jump scare / To a catwalk / On a tightrope over burning ash.”
The bouncy “Character Flaw” uses buzzy guitars and chirpy organ as Linnell describes, in first person but in very general terms, his titular flaw. “It’s not a part of my charm / It’s not pleasant at all / Everyone already knows about my character flaw.” The relentlessly upbeat music paired with something awful is another TMBG staple, and this one is a highlight of the album.
“Get Down” is a funk-rock workout featuring the band’s horn section, who now seem to be a permanent part of the group. They Might Be Giants are probably not the first artists to juxtapose the idea of getting down (dancing) with the command to get down (on the floor), but it works here. Linnell’s exhortations to “get down” are definitely the latter, but they’re combined with one of the band’s most danceable tracks.
Not every rocker works quite as well on The World Is to Dig. Linnell’s “Je N’en Ai Pas”,” featuring French-language lyrics composed entirely of phrases Linnell already knew or had learned on DuoLingo, is fun in concept, but musically it’s generic. Flansburgh’s “In the Dead Mall” is upbeat but feels a little slight. Similarly, “What the Cat Dragged In” chugs along and effectively employs the horns, but doesn’t quite land its intentionally mixed metaphor.
The band covers the Raspberries’ “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)”, which is fun, as both singers do some lead vocals. In fact, The World Is to Dig is the first They Might Be Giants album in a while in which both Johns consistently sing on each other’s songs. For a long time, their standard has been for whichever person wrote the song to do all the vocals in the studio, with occasional exceptions. Here, though, nearly every time there are backing vocals, it’s the other John doing the harmonies. It’s a throwback to the group’s 1980s and 1990s style, and it’s really nice to hear.
Most of Flansburgh’s songs are more laid-back this time out. The deliberately-paced “Garbage In” seems to be about suffering from depression and not wanting to get out of bed. Yet its chorus intrudes with zombie lore, “As old Bob would softly sigh / Remove the head or destroy the brain / Those are the two solutions.” That suddenly puts the lyrics in another context, as the narrator may actually be hiding out from a zombie apocalypse.
“New Wave Will Never Die” is minor key and a bit unsettling, with a slight Latin tinge. Much like “Wu Tang”, though, it has nothing to do musically with the genre mentioned in the title. The low-key “Hit the Ground” has a really nice arrangement that relies on bass and synths. It also seems built around the refrain, “My heart hit the ground / And now it’s broken.”
Linnell’s “Let’s Fall in Lava” is a sweet ballad that seems like a play on the similarity between the words “love” and “lava”. It’s definitely about a couple, but textually it’s literally about “Let’s fall in lava / Jump into magma.” “Telescope” is the record’s shortest track, a minute of distorted percussion and keyboards with Linnell declaring, “Everything’s fake / Thought is the thing that’s real.”
“Slow” might be the record’s most experimental track, as Linnell brings his fascination with microtones onto a major They Might Be Giants release for the first time. Lyrically, he sings about a person drinking a magic potion that slows reality down. From there, the song goes from a relaxed tempo to something that sounds completely off-key, but is 100% intentional. He also employs the synth tone and almost the exact riff from “Can’t Keep Johnny Down” as a sort of solo here, only to distort it completely into a wash of microtones. It’s because the band is so determined to keep doing the big, catchy stuff elsewhere that they can get away with truly bizarre ideas like “Slow” on their albums.
They Might Be Giants’ penchant for genre-hopping doesn’t always make for cohesive albums, and The World is to Dig is no exception. The group has always given listeners a musical buffet to choose from, and that makes it harder to make broad, definitive statements about the overall quality of their records. The World Is to Dig is sort of a typical record for this stage of their career. There are some absolute banger tracks, some really weird, very successful experiments, and another handful of tracks where listeners’ mileage may vary.
Longtime fans will find plenty to enjoy here, but if somehow this is someone’s first They Might Be Giants album, The World Is to Dig is representative enough to send them burrowing into the wormhole that is the band’s extensive catalog.