They Might Be Giants: Flood : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Because they're such hip, zany absurdists, They Might Be Giants open their first major-label album with a wacky fanfare. "It's a brand new record for 1990!" goes the twenty-nine-second "Theme From Flood," sung as if it were a rejected Sixties-TV theme song. Yes, it's zany, but the joke backfires: In fact, Flood defines the self-satisfied smugness and proudly disposable pop culture of the Eighties. It's an album that, with its smirking Letterman-like coyness, would be more at home in a time capsule than on a stereo system.

Now that the freshness of their Dorks on Parade shtick has worn off, the Giants – New York singer-songwriters John Flansburgh and John Linnell – need to prove themselves an all-out novelty act or trenchant musical parodists. Judging from Flood, they are unwilling to make either commitment or are simply incapable of doing so. The nineteen ditties crammed onto the album – sophomoric throwaways ("Particle Man" and "Whistling in the Dark"), ersatz jazz ("Hot Cha") and country ("Lucky Ball & Chain") and an overdose of their standard-issue oompah pop – aren't as ingratiating as the Giants think they are. The duo's vocals remain gratingly nasal. The parodies, such as they are, are little more than strings of pop-culture non sequiturs ("My story's infinite/Like the Longines Symphonette"), and attempts at direct satirical blows are constantly undermined – a cutesy trumpet solo, for instance, ruins the otherwise well-intended "Your Racist Friend."

To be fair, Flood is the best-sounding Giants record so far, thanks to meatier production (some of it by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who have worked with Elvis Costello, among others) and instrumentation that expands the low-rent accordion-and-drum-machine arrangements of their earlier albums and EPs on Bar/None. Ultimately, however, this is music with one sole purpose: to attract attention to its own cleverness. Most of these songs aren't about anything but being clever. Too glib for their own good, too absorbed in their own facileness to bother with anything other than campy emotions, They Might Be Giants might just try being a little more genuine.