My alphabetisation skills have failed me again. This album has been in the wrong spot for years (I blame my weird belief that ‘liquor’ is spelled ‘licq…”.
As you’ll discover if I ever make it to the letter ‘T’, I once had quite the fixation on the work of the They Might Be Giants. In those pre-internet days, I was on their mailing list, and a member of their CD-a-month club for a couple of years.
Among the many esoteric releases (all EPs) was a five-track version of this long-player. I subsequently sold all the EPs for a tidy sum in the early days of eBay. Like a drunk dotcom investor I parlayed a small portion of buying this album.
The CD is exactly what you’d think – 15 songs about US states (plus one overly ambitious theme song title Songs of the 50 States). This stinks of one of a lame high school creative writing exercises, and the results are suitably hodge podge.
Linnell may well have simply added the name of a state to a few songs he had laying about (e.g. I don’t see the connection between bicycle-crashing and South Carolina). States are anthropomorphised and a lot of attention is paid to their respective shapes on a map.
It’s not a complete mess, and there is the usual wild range of well-executed ideas in the mix that TMBG fans expect, but ultimately I find it too throwaway and underwhelming. See what you think:
File under: More like South Australia than Victoria
One Album a Day 