Looks like I’m way overdue for a write-up of They Might Be Giant’s second album Lincoln. Just like how Lincoln himself was…way overdue…uh, for…um…not getting, uh, shot? Whoops! Let’s start over.
Lincoln is not named after Mr. Shot-in-the-Head, but rather John Linnell’s and John Flansburgh’s childhood hometown of Lincoln, Massachusetts. The cryptic cover art shows the Johns’ respective grandfathers’ pictures displayed behind lecterns for no real reason that I can tell, but paired with the name Lincoln it always felt ominously political to me. And maybe some the record is political if you poke around deep enough into these lyrics? We as an audience will likely never know.
This album is very similar to the debut. 18 unpredictable songs packed into 39 minutes overflowing with catchy melodies, stylistic experiments, goofy instruments, lyrical shenanigans, dorky wordplay, and nasally voices aplenty. To my ears, this album is less “colorful” and more “mature” than the first, maybe because many of these songs seem to be more realized and constructed into, like, actual songs. I used the term “load-bearing filler” to describe some of the tunes on the debut, where it seemed like a complete mess of ideas were thrown against the wall just to see what could stick; there’s less of those types of tunes on Lincoln for sure. That alone gives this album the edge, but both are essential early TMBG. Both are worth it.
With Lincoln, the Johns have really beefed up the wordplay. Almost every song contains these twisty, mind-bending phrases that are complete nonsense, but they might not be! Fake profoundness! “Lie Still, Little Bottle” is a beatnik, lounge jazz Flansburgh vehicle with a touch of sleaze, here are my favorite lines: “‘There’s no time for metaphors’/Cried the little pill to me/He said ‘Life is a placebo’/Masquerading as a simile’“). I spent a lot of time thinking about that one! It’s like it almost works on several levels, but instead the levels are isolated instead of intertwined. Here’s another one: “The World’s Address”, another Flansburgh song, this time with some samba flavor, has a pun right in the title. Here’s a lyric: “The world’s address/A place that’s worn/A sad pun that reflects a sadder mess“. Self-aware meta wordplay? How about “Shoehorn with Teeth”? “He wants a shoehorn/The kind with teeth/People should get beat up/For stating their beliefs“. More self-aware wordplay! These smarty men just won’t stop.
The consistency of this album is certainly an improvement, as previously mentioned with respect to the debut’s load-bearing filler. Here, though, there are only a couple of songs that do absolutely nothing for me. The first is “Cage and Aquarium”, which is annoyingly bouncy and even more annoyingly sung with a nod to the 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius” (“This is the spawning of the cage and aquarium…“). The other is “I’ve Got a Match”, which is easily the most straightly-played sentimental song here and, therefore, a little dull. It also feels a whole lot longer than it actually is, maybe because there are about three false stops at the end. I used to dislike “You’ll Miss Me”, the bizarre jazz-rap collage with Flansburgh spitting his words like some sort of Louie Armstrong/Fat Albert hybrid, but it’s grown on me over time.
The rest of the album ranges from good to excellent. “Ana Ng”, the opener, is one of the most quintessential (and one of the best) TMBG tunes, featuring an unforgettable melody and some masterfully thoughtful lyrics about a person from Peru who is love with a woman whom he has never met, Ana Ng, on the exact opposite end of the world in Vietnam. I love the creative opening lines that describe this antipode: “Make a hole with gun perpendicular to the name of this town on a desktop globe/Exit wound in a foreign nation, showing the home of the one this was written for“. It’s oddly touching. Other major album highlights (at least in my opinion, there’s a TMBG song for everyone) include the eerie, paranoia-fueled “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go” that even contains “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah” musical quotes played out in creepy staccato, the dreary military march of “Pencil Rain”, woven with snare drum cadences and pencil puns and a cool Morse code section during the instrumental bridge, the previously mention “The World’s Address”, and the musically upbeat but lyrically depressing divorce song “They’ll Need a Crane” (“Lad looks at other gals/Gal thinks Jim Beam is handsomer than Lad“). The couple is so intertwisted in each other’s lives that they need a crane to actually emotionally separate.
I think Lincoln is the best example of TMBG’s ability to combine childlike playfulness with heavy, dark topics. Nearly every song has some disquieting attribute undercutting the positive, jaunty beats, goofy words, and colorful instruments. “Purple Toupee” is a musical synthfest celebration, but it seems to be about how the memories of important societal events, in this case the Civil Rights Movements of the ’60s and the Kennedy assassination, are just a jumbled, incoherent mess for a person who lived through them as a child. “Santa’s Beard” brings to mind both Beastie Boys and the Cars, and it appears to be a more directly blunt take on “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. The final song, “Kiss Me, Son of God”, addresses class system corruption with some of the Johns’ least cryptic lyrics that you’ll find in the early years (“I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage/Called the blood of the exploited working class“). It also has some pretty violin and cello arrangements that undermine the sincerity of the narrator’s empathy. It’s a great way to do social commentary without appearing preachy or self-indulgent, and shows that John and John can assign real meaning behind what they write when they want to. It’s not all dumb fun, I guess.
In my experience, it’s difficult to find an album jam-packed with musical ideas that are almost all exceptional. Lincoln is overflowing with brilliance, creativity, and humbleness. This is a very good place to start a TMBG discography journey, and it may very well be their best album to date. I’m quite partial to Apollo 18 myself, but like I said, every TMBG fan will have very different opinions about both the good and the bad. In this case, the consensus is fairly clear-cut. This is one Lincoln that won’t be assassinated in fans’ hearts anytime soon!
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