“It’s a brand new record for 1990/They Might Be Giants’ brand new album Flood” – “Theme From Flood” from They Might Be Giants’ 1990 album Flood, the best third album named Flood from a band until the experimental Japanese band Boris puts out their third album Flood in 2000!

Flood flood flood flood flood. The word has lost all meaning now. That’s called “semantic satiation”, friends, but I’m not here to talk about semantic satiation! I’m here to talk about Flood! Yes, that’s right, a flood of sperm! That’s called “semen-tic satiation”, friends, but I’m not here to-

TMBG’s third studio album is their first on a major label, which means better production, better equipment, and better marketing. The Johns’ promotion of Flood was their most successful, and by a long shot it’s their most well-known album to date. They were approached by Warner Bros. to make music videos out of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” and “Particle Man” for Tiny Toon Adventures, and the Johns credit a lot of Flood’s mainstream success to this exposure to a young audience. Admittedly, fuckin’ Tiny Toons is why I know about They Might Be Giants, and Flood was the first album by a real band that I ever bought with my own money! “Weird Al” doesn’t count.

Fancy schmancy major label perks aside, this record isn’t a significant deviation away from their established formula of stylistic diversity and humorous wordplay. It’s not nearly as weird, though. I mean, it’s still weird, but it’s not even close to what we’ve had before. The Johns took special care for their Elektra debut to not alienate a new audience with too much oddball silliness in order to avoid being stamped as a novelty act. Did it work? Well, two songs were on Tiny Toons so I don’t know for sure. All I know is, it’s plenty silly anyway, people really like this album, and the band’s legacy lives on. In a nutshell, who cares?

There are pros and cons to reigning in the weird a little bit. Mainstream approaches to songwriting means more pressure is actually put on the songwriting itself to carry the burden of hooking the listener, since weirdness can be an easy copout hook strategy. The good news for them is that they’ve already successfully done some of these kinds of songs before. Think “She’s an Angel” off the debut, or “They’ll Need a Crane” off of Lincoln. There’s just more of it here this time. I think songs like “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, “Twisting”, and “I Want a Rock” are examples of amazing mainstream songwriting, and indeed most of the front half of Flood showcases these types of songs. The back half is reserved for the weirder stuff, and on this album I think it’s all way weaker than anything on the front half. Flood is TMBG’s most front-loaded album in their catalog by far.

So let me start by singing the front half’s praises. But before I start singing the front half’s praises, how about I instead sing the faults! I personally dislike “Dead”, a slow-moving shuffle that relies more on its wordplay than its melody, and the pseudo-calypso “Your Racist Friend” seems like an uncharacteristically literal sociopolitical take for a They Might Be Giants song. Although, there are some great guitar riffs and some nice horn parts during the instrumental bridge, so it’s not all racism and friendship here.

With that out of the way, the rest of the front half is great to excellent, with the aforementioned “Birdhouse in Your Soul” being the band’s HIGHEST. CHARTING. SINGLE. EVER. At #3 on the US Alternative Airplay chart. But, hey, recognition is recognition! And it’s a jaunty song, too! It’s about a nightlight shaped like a bluebird, and John Linnell wastes no lyric making this clear in riddle fashion (“My name is blue canary/One note spelled L-I-T-E” is just one of many). “Lucky Ball & Chain” is another jubilantly depressive Flansburgh classic about divorce and/or heartache, with most of the song bouncy except for the short, dissonant minor-key bridge that betrays a real sense of inner turmoil (and it’s the best part of the song, even if only lasts about four measures). “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” is a fantastic reworking of some ’50s novelty song that was written 500 years after the fall of Constantinople, and it has some great fuckin’ trumpet bits and snake-y Eastern violin keeping the song exciting all the way through. For a bonus, check out the live version on TMBG’s Severe Tire Damage concert album, which has one of the most astonishingly beautiful trumpet solos I’ve ever heard on a live rock track. The one-two-three pop earworm punch of “Particle Man”, “Twisting”, and “We Want a Rock” will stick in your head for years, guaranteed. Also, if you’re like me, then for most of your early/mid teenage years you were exposed to new bands based solely upon them being namedropped in other bands’ songs, so then you also checked out the dB’s and the Young Fresh Fellows since they were both mentioned in “Twisting”. And then you liked them. Hint hint.

Side Two is weaker, but after giving this album another listen I think it’s really only because Side One is so damn strong that it’s a hard act to follow. A couple of these tracks are perfectly catchy, but they lack real character, like “Hot Cha” (a song barely based on one of the racehorses from an old Parker Brothers game about the Kentucky Derby) and “Women & Men” (a cheerful sea shanty about the proliferation of the human race). More likely, they’re so short that there isn’t much room to flesh them out. “Minimum Wage” is a total throwaway where Flansburgh yelps “MINIMUM WAAAAAAAGE! YEEHAW!” with a Rawhide whipcrack. Dumb! Others, like “Letterbox”, “They Might Be Giants”, “Road Movie to Berlin”, they’re all fine at best. I just can’t get too excited about any of it, it almost feels like Side Two is a different album altogether. Although I do like the glistening synth droplets all over “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love”, and the military march of “Whistling in the Dark”. Both of these tracks should trade places with Side One’s “Dead” and “Your Racist Friend”.

Oh man, and “Hearing Aid” I really hated that the first 45 times I heard it; a lo-fi, noisy swing number with about a minute of useless industrial noise at the end. I’ve come to really appreciate it because, like everything else, it’s too smart for its own good. Bad production because the song’s narrator can barely hear anyway, he turns off his hearing aid so that he doesn’t have to listen to his boss berating him (“For king-lazybones like myself” can be easily interpreted as “fucking lazy bums like myself” to someone who didn’t hear it very well), and then the final minute of clicking and whirring is possibly the internal head-noise of the guy with the hearing aid turned off. I’ve come around on it completely. So at least there’s that!

A lopsided album, but the positives far outweigh the negatives, and early TMBG is always a great option anyway EVEN IF THEY SOLD OUT TO A MAJOR LABEL. Ha! What a fake fucking complaint about any band!

GOOD