Join Us

A long-awaited album for adults

They Might Be Giants for many years have expressed their claim to the status of music big guys, and in this respect they have made quite a progress. Sure, they can’t be considered real giants, but they certainly are standout figures easy to distinguish in the multitude of performers. The duo of two Johns, (Flensburg and Linnell) is still interesting to a wide audience, mostly because they have always seen the music as a huge field for creative experiments. Step by step, They Might Be Giants taught their listeners to be ready to expect anything from them to come anytime. Their last releases are a good illustration to how free they feel now. For the past four years, the duo have written a lot of material, but taking liberty to forget their basic fan base and start looking for new supporters among really young music lovers. To a great surprise, the musicians plunged into making children’s music and soundtracks for TV shows, leaving their core followers without a decent record for several years. In the meantime, the duo have always been known for regular studio releases of proper content. Through with stuff for kids, They Might Be Giants surfaced in 2011 with a normal ‘adult’ album called Join Us.

They Might Be Giants look like themselves again

With its carelessness and summertime joyfulness, Joins Us, like a high-speed train, carries the listener into the remote time stations, to be more exact, into the eighties, when They Might Be Giants were only starting to climb up to stardom gathering all-out recognition. Keeping intact the atmosphere of fun-filled days and sleepless nights, the musicians adjusted slightly the toolkit, adding some more means of expression. Moderns arrangements, hand-clapping and foot-tapping effects, and horns, definitely, brought into the They Might Be Giants music even more colors and emotions. As a matter of fact, the duo’s fresh songs are old college rock with pop-styled melodies and drive-providing guitars. What makes them something more than songs offered by a great number of other suchlike performers is nonstandard, sometimes witty, sometimes absurd, lyrics, and genuine naughtiness of the musicians that infects their listeners as well. The CD features 18 brand new tracks lasting less than 50 minutes. The musicians know that their songs should be short enough to offer the best they can and end before they can get boring. Two to three minutes is the appropriate size.

Joins Us restore faith in the duo

The hard task is to single out the most valuable tracks out of the eighteen presented on Join Us. But what one can do is to find those that reveal some deviations from the duo’s format, like folk underflow in Old Pine Box, or hip-hop statements in The Lady And The Tiger, or a thin film of electronic on Dog Walker. These three still form an inseparable whole with the rest of the set as they complete the feel of the album. Eighteen times They Might Be Giants try to drag the listener to a party, and only in their last song, You Don’t Like Me, do they abandon their efforts and say that if you are still not with them, you’re not going to join them, ever. As a conclusion, we must say that the duet has not released as strong an album as Join Us in many years, offering a collection of exclusively fine and fascinating tracks. It could be nostalgia and desire to bring back the moments of past joys, albeit for a short while, or something else, but They Might Be Giants will, no doubt, cheer up their old fans who had already let in sad thoughts about the duo’s plans and prospects.