CD of The Week

With an amazing three decades of music making under the belts, They Might Be Giants continue to crank out their unique brand of catchy, pop-rock tunes. Nanobots is John Flansburgh & John Linnell’s 15th proper studio album (counting their three children’s releases) and comes less than two years after Join Us, their best record in almost a decade. (Plus there was their 2nd release in 2011, Album Raises New And Troubling Questions, a collection of Join Us leftovers, live tracks and remixes.) Needless to say, it’s been an extra-productive decade thus far for the Johns.

Nanobots starts with a bang with “You’re On Fire,” one of the most memorable songs on the record. The title track will get trapped inside your brain, perhaps like the subject of the song! Flansburgh’s paranoid “Black Ops” is most likely the first rock song written that references drone warfare. Other highlights include Linnell’s disturbingly Oedipal, baritone sax-tastic “Call You Mom,” while “Stone Cold Coup d’Etat” could serve as the theme song for a demented sitcom (I think the Johns’ have some familiarity with that concept…). TMBG albums also have a long history of quasi-educational songs, and “Tesla” fits the bill this time.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the new album is the number of super-short tracks: there are 25 tunes on Nanobots and the shortest clocks in at just six seconds! Slightly reminiscent of their classic “Fingertips” suite of quick songs and hooks from Apollo 18, Nanobots features a number of tiny bite-size tunes, seemingly randomly clumped together in the middle of the album.

Nanobots doesn’t quite have the same old-school TMBG spark that Join Us did, but it’s certainly another worthy addition to the Johns’ massive catalog. TMBG return to Philly at The TLA(a venue they’ve played so much, they wrote a song about it!) on April 5th.