“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

December of 1971 was extremely eventful for the Mothers of Invention. First, during a show in France, some dickhead in the audience fired a flare gun that burned down the casino. As everyone knows, this incident was immortalized in Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”. The band lost $50,000 (equivalent to $320,000 today) worth of equipment and had to rent equipment for the rest of the tour, which wouldn’t last much longer anyway BECAUSE, secondly, a week later, Frank himself was attacked and knocked off stage by a member of the audience in London. He landed in the orchestra pit, which severely injured his head, neck, back, and one of his legs. This was the best thing to ever happen to Frank Zappa!

I mean, no, not really. He was wheelchair-bound for almost a year, suffered permanent back pain for the rest of his life, and a crushed larynx that changed his voice. He couldn’t tour during recovery, and THAT’S the good part, because it meant bye-bye Flo & Eddie! They didn’t want to wait for a recovery that may never happen, so they scooped up some Mothers members and went off on their own to continue their wildly unsuccessful frontman careers. Meanwhile, not content to sit around doing nothing, Zappa put his brain to some paper and started composing some jazz fusion music reminiscent of the immediate pre-Flo & Eddie era. In my mind, he picked up where he left off. After jotting down some freshly composed music, he assembled a team of session musicians (and some of the old Mothers alumni) and put together his own big band combo. Waka/Jawaka is the spiritual second installment of the trinity of jazz fusion records that are often lumped together in discussions about Zappa’s foray into jazz fusioning; the first being Hot Rats, the second being The Grand Wazoo. I like this one the best.

Four tracks total, 36 minutes. “Big Swifty” is the album’s 17-minute grand entrance; a jaw-dropping display of hyper-fast technical noodlings, layered instrumentation, and complex, professional, and mature compositional flexing. In fact, you could say the same about the title track “Waka/Jawaka”, which is the album’s 11-minute grand exit! Both tracks feature some of the most impossibly intricate and demanding jazz fusion outside of Miles Davis’ electric period, but Frank didn’t load up these arrangements with atonal, nonsensically avant-garde filler either. The album is at its most experimental during the more spacey sections of “Big Swifty”, but it never feels like the music completely disappears among trippy sludge like your average Sun Ra record. Anyone going into Waka/Jawaka with hesitations over the immense track lengths, worried about expansive John Zorn freak-outs or even, godforbid, Chick Corea or Pat Methany elevator muzak, they will be pleasantly surprised to find none of that here. After the opening theme and about a minute of tasteful full-band improvisation, “Big Swifty” features George Duke soloing on keyboard, then Sal Marquez soloing on trumpet, then Zappa himself improvising with guitar while Duke and Marquez continue noodling in the background. All these instruments lazily swirl around each other, creating moody and suspenseful atmosphere. I think the 17 minutes go by fast, but I also hit my head on concrete about 250 times as a child.

Gotta get back to the title track for a few comments. That bombastic staccato brass intro, followed by that raw, yet smooth and fluttery, trumpet solo over slightly exotic acoustic guitar accompaniment, followed by the dreamy and hazy Moog synthesizer solo? *chef’s kiss* Exquisite. Absolutely phenomenal. If anyone knows anything out there among early-’70s jazz fusion that hits the mark like the first five minutes of “Waka/Jawaka” please let me know, because I need more of this in my life. The next few minutes of Zappa’s guitar soloing, just like any other Zappa guitar solo, is excellent. After a brief drum solo, we come to a closing reprise that hits the major melodies introduced at the beginning of the piece, although slower. Fade to black. Fantastic.

The middle two tracks are vocal pieces with inoffensive lengths. “Your Mouth” is blues rock gone delightfully, horribly awry, with odd swaggering vocals and some cool horn parts. It feels like a demented alternate-universe Chunga’s Revenge cut (“Your mouth/Is your religion/You put your face in a hole like that“). “It Just Might Be a One-Shot Deal” fuses jazz with country-western music in an inconceivably perfect combination, ending with a blissful pedal steel guitar solo that could have been 45 minutes longer and I would have been on board for every single second. Any Zappa skeptic should at least hear this one, it’s one of the greatest underrated achievements of Zappa’s oeuvre and it’s buried here forever on one of his jazz fusion albums. As far as I’m aware, the track was never performed live in its entirety. Usually parts get chopped up for the “Greggery Peccary” suite, most notably the “You should be digging it while it’s happening” jump before the solo.

I think this whole album is a masterpiece. The immediate follow-up The Grand Wazoo does not hit any of the same ultra-highs for me despite its wider range of styles and motifs. Thank fucking God that Zappa was nearly crippled or else we would’ve had 100 more Flo & Eddie albums to sift through instead. I can’t even imagine that, it’s too painful.

VERY GOOD