Written by Ben Garcia
The dynamic duo of John and John, Flansburgh and Linnell, make They Might Be Giants (TMBG) one of the most interesting bands of the past 45 years. Their mix of goofy and fun musicality paired with their complex and often equally goofy lyrics hides the very real social commentary that underpins their music; their new EP Eyeball is no exception. You might know the band from the song Istanbul (not Constantinople) from their 3rd album Flood, but that was 36 years before the release of Eyeball, they were both released on January 15th, so how does this duo bring their signature flair to the 21st century in lieu of The World Is to Dig their next studio in the last 5 years?
For anyone new to They Might Be Giants, the group is a post-modern rock band known for paradoxical lyrics and catchy tunes, with a side of niche pop culture and literary references. It’s a good time if you don’t mind the absurdity of the concept, and when I mean absurdity, I mean it in the philosophical sense of ignoring the meaninglessness of life with whatever you want it to mean; in this case, it means adding whatever instruments you can get a hold of into your slightly off-kilter soft-rock songs for kicks and giggles. That’s the basics of They Might Be Giants: a rejection of norms and rules of what life and music are supposed to be in favor of fun and flavor in their place.
Eyeball is a EP with only 4 tracks so I won’t bother with trying to summarize each track and instead I am going to focus on a more detailed look on each song and how it relates to the rest of the tracks on the EP; If I am being completely honest I expected more tracks from John and John but considering that their last studio album was 5 years ago I will take what I can get.
We start Eyeball with the track of the same name and instantly get a short little introduction to what the EP is going to be, just by the first verse, as shown below.
Someone’s got control of my mind
Nothing that I do is my responsibility now
No wait, ignore the thing I just said, it wasn’t true, and this is
We should expect to get an unreliable narrator, possibly mine control, and perhaps a crazed lunatic trying to talk to us about their eyeball, apparently they only have one, so this is fairly standard TMBG stuff: the EP carries this lunacy throughout with the narrator continuing to mention their love-hate relationship with modern jazz. Overall, Eyeball the song is rather unnerving in its lyrics, but it’s very catchy in its instrumentation. It kind of sounds like an intro to a late-night art student TV Movie that comes on when everyone else is asleep, and you just can’t manage to shut your eyes. It is upbeat, it’s simple, it has a nice piano and guitar rhythm about it, but you can see that it’s just not right, not some random string of meaningless musical noise, but instead a carefully crafted piece meant to hide the confronting nature of the words being sung.
The Glamour of Rock comes next; it is a short, almost transitional, song that carries the uneasy paradox of the EP forward into a modern jazz-like sound with lyrics of laundry and loathing. Not loathing laundry per se, though I am sure that it’s probably included as well, but just loathing in general. We come across what can best be described as the haunting of a man doing his laundry. I like to think it’s one of the Johns, as the ghost of Rock n Roll past takes control, filling the man’s mind with the past glory of his youth. Besides this encounter with paranormal forces beyond our realm, the song is mostly about how John and John are losing that spark of excitement once felt when starting their careers as there is nothing glamorous about “doing your laundry on a show day” and if that’s what the most glamorous part of the day you are supposed to go on stage, well we can say that the show will be mellow to say the least. The song itself is mellow with a steady drum pattern, strumming guitar, and a swooping horn section, all making up the main body of the mix. There is little change in the rhythm with a little build-up at the end of each chorus section, but overall the song is a malaisely of jazz detailing the end of the energy that TMBG had in the first track that then carries into the new sound of track 3.
Peggy Guggenheim is the name of an avid American art collector and socialite, and what she has to do with the third song Peggy Guggenheim is completely lost on me, and unfortunately, so are the lyrics of this song, because there are none, as we have gone full modern jazz. I will be honest with you, I don’t know how to truly describe this song to you in a meaningful way, as it is completely beyond my vocabulary and expertise when it comes to music, but I will give it the old college try. The song starts out with a funky, deep keyboard bass line backed up with a snapping drum beat hanging out, but not quite following at the same pace. We then get a Baritone Saxophone joining in with the bass, then a scratchy electric guitar makes its way alongside the other two, joining in the groove. We then cut into an ascending brass loop with the saxophone and bass sliding into the back to play some long chords to bring some body into the mix. The saxophone makes a break with the cord and gives a final hooray before we hear the brass give a high-pitched squeal that moves us onto a new, faster drum pattern; we are now on a new and much stranger part of the song.
It’s now that my ability to accurately describe this song begins to fall apart as some of the sounds in the mix I’m almost confident aren’t even instruments, or if they are, I have never heard them or of them. We do hear our merry three musketeers come back from a moment, for the rest of the song, it is wilted low brass and a loud and punchy percussion note that barges in at the most annoying and aggravating times; overall, the song has a solid first third that is then ruined by the inclusion of these unlistenable instruments. If you are not into modern jazz and if you are not a fan of listening to music ironically, then don’t listen to this track, as it has actively made my day worse.
So what about track 4? Hopefully, we have something to bring out of bizzaro-land funk, well, no. It is a remix of Eyeball by Too Elegant, so I am not going to try to describe all the details of this mix, as I have described the bulk of the song. But what’s so different about this mix? Well, Too Elegant added more percussion and took away most of everything else, and as much as the added kick, the removal of literally all other instruments destroys the character of the song. If Eyeball track 1 sounded like the intro to a show, Eyeball (Too Elegant mix) sounds like the outro where everyone is leaving, the credits play, and you look for the remote to turn the TV off and finally go to bed.
The Eyeball EP as a whole is underwhelming, not due to its quantity of songs but to the quality of songs. Track 1 isn’t very catchy, Track 2 isn’t long enough, Track 3 is too strange to be music, and Track 4 takes away all the charm of Track 1. This EP is painfully disappointing, but that isn’t the end of the road for us. Eyeball was released ahead of a new album, which hopefully will have some better bones to it, but we will have to wait and see. Eyeball is the leftovers from the creative process of The World Is To Dig, which has been described by the band as “all bangers,” so I expect much better things from a band able to make much better music come April 14th of this year; one can dream.