[music] THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS - The Spine (Zoe)

In many ways this is Flood without "Particle Man" or "Istanbul". The overt style-hijinks of Mink Car have been tamped down somewhat so that even the fragmentary tracks sound like part of a Pop Album. Is that good? I think it's good, maybe even very very good. Flansburgh's "Memo To Human Resources" disappointed me on the Indestructible Object EP, but now that I've heard it a few times the refrain "Then some people came to talk me down / But I don't need advice; I'm down" strikes me as beautiful, and the tepid drumming I originally objected to now seems close to the right balance between sadness and forced calm. Drop the drums entirely and "I'm down" loses its double meaning. ("Memo" and "Au Contraire" appear here unchanged from the EP versions.)

The long-awaited "Thunderbird", formerly a rare example of TMBG genuinely rocking out on stage, has less internal justification for its new muted palette, but the old "Thunderbird" wouldn't have fit on this album and it's still catchy. So I suspend judgment on that.

Almost everything else just falls into place. "Prevenge" shows Flansburgh continuing to take cues from Linnell lyrically, mixing Fonzie bravado with a look directly into the void, and Linnell's "Stalk Of Wheat" makes him the new (or rather, the old) Erin McKeown/Nellie McKay in under 90 seconds. (Of the two, I think only McKeown could actually sing it -- Nellie McKay wouldn't swing "I was all out of juice / Like a moose / Like a moose denied" without sounding like she thought it was funny, thereby blowing it.)

The pleasures that have always been in TMBG's music are, lately, occasionally the pleasures of music critics and hipsters -- do you think that Brian Wilson cover was a coincidence? Hard to imagine that a rapprochement is at hand, though.