They Might Be Giants: Back to the future

Friends since junior high in Lincoln, Massachusetts, John Flansburgh and John Linnell have kept up a steady outpouring of oddball pop songs since reuniting in Brooklyn in 1981 as They Might Be Giants. In all their years of musicmaking together, this brilliant and annoying duo have never altered their haircuts, learned how to play a decent guitar solo, or committed themselves to a particular musical genre or straightforward show of emotion. Even more amazing, they've always carried off their pastiche of everything from polka to punk and conga to country with an air of indifferent excess, as if they were just a couple of precocious kids screwing around with a paint-by-numbers kit.

Yet behind this postmodern razzle-dazzle, there has always been the antiseptic whiff of what in the broadest sense you might call folkie purism. Their fascination with DIY home taping, their tireless work ethic, their alienation from their own libidos -- all of this belies the duo's oh-so-pomo experimentation, suggesting a sensibility as obsessive, high-minded, and unique as John Lee Hooker's or Mark E. Smith's. True, they skewered the paranoid insularity of a "Hide Away Folk Family" on their very first album; yet that was followed, three ditties further on, with a title that's the secret pledge of folkies everywhere: "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes."

Those tunes can now be heard in a double-CD retrospective that shows how far They Might Be Giants have and haven't come. Then: The Earlier Years (Restless) is a daunting 72-song compilation of all their releases on their first label, Bar/None, plus several unreleased recordings from their "Dial-a-Song" project. As is natural with these kinds of things, the packaging cultivates a homy feel of nostalgia for the band's innocent youth gone bye-bye (the graphics feature cute maritime cartoons, perfect for any little boy's bedroom, and the two Johns' entertaining liner notes are loaded with back-in-them-days details). Yet thanks to their hard-edged purism, there's nothing nostalgic about the music. In defiance of all common sense, the duo's uncommitted, happenstance style has proved far more durable, both artistically and commercially, than the earnest labor of most of their trendsetting peers from the mid '80s.

In the end, though, not even folkie purists can totally escape the changes wrought by fashion and technology. The duo may not have strayed far from their true path, but the world has evolved around them, so we hear them differently nonetheless. The heart of the compilation is the group's first two full-length albums, They Might Be Giants (1986) and Lincoln (1988). Any open-eared pop lover will still be dazzled by the way their complex but ridiculously catchy melodies and tricky but ridiculously allusive lyrics are juxtaposed with kitschy instrumentation and goofy throwaways guaranteed to turn off any classic-rock fan in earshot. By now, though, this project is pretty much old hat, as anyone who has ever heard of Frank Black or Ween should know. To compensate, the compilation tries to make up in quantity what it can't quite recapture in quality. As with so much pomo excess, too much of a good thing is just too much. Back then, I thought Lincoln was a decent album but a huge step down from the existential perfection of TMBG. Today, with all the EP and bonus tracks stuck on each CD, they sound like brilliant, annoying hodge-podges.

Still, that hasn't daunted anyone from picking up this reformatted version. In its first week out, the compilation sold more than 5000 copies, a fairly phenomenal number for a package with a $27.98 list price. From the looks of the audience at TMBG's sold-out Avalon show a couple weeks ago, a lot of these sales went to younger fans who accept postmodern hodge-podges as a musical norm. Try as they might to be true to their small-core roots, They Might Be Giants have turned into giants after all.

-- Franklin Soults