They Might Be Giants - Apollo 18 (1992)

It took me about 15 years to realize how weird Apollo 18 is.  Having been exposed to it as a small child (I have no memory of the first time I heard it; to me, it has simply always been), I had no frame of reference for its insular strangeness disguised in pop and rock trappings.  Sure, I knew the words, but I was unable to separate the lyrical landscape from the bouncy, catchy music.  Upon revisiting the album as a grown n' sexy adult, it was now clear.  This is 45 minutes of two weird, possibly probably mildly autistic dudes dropping you into the sea of circular linguistic abstractions and curious situational hyperspecifics that exist within their inscrutable headspaces.

Take the lyrics to "The Statue Got Me High" out of the context of its upbeat instrumental (dig that tuba work), and you have an ominous tale of monolithic possession and destroyed psyche.  Even Flansburgh, usually the more conventional of the two Johns, gets waaaay out there on the creepy, foreboding "Hall of Heads" while still remaining white-boy-fawnky.  Yet despite the sinister edge underlying most of the songs, this remains a toe-tapping, fun listening experience.  There's even a couple of "normal" tunes; the biology lesson "Mammal" is a precursor to their later-career material oriented toward educating children, and "Narrow Your Eyes" is an earnestly straightforward lament to love diminished by time and bitterness.

Musically, the songs branch out into a lot of different territories.  Imagine if Ween were socially dysfunctional eggheads building worlds inside their heads as they daydreamed in the back of class, instead of socially dysfunctional shitheads huffing glue and chuckling like Beavis and Butt-head in the back of class annoying the hell out of everyone, and you'll have a vague idea of what this sounds like.

The interstitial snippets of "Fingertips" were originally meant to be scattered throughout the album while listening to it on shuffle, but here I have left them as a single combined track.  Strung back to back to back etc., they become pleasurably disorienting.

Looking back, I wonder if absorbing such a bizarre album at such a young age had anything to do with me becoming the weirdo I am today.  I sure hope so.

If you've never listened to They Might Be Giants and only know the name, start here.  If you can't find anything about Apollo 18 to appreciate, they are probably not for you.

Let's get weird (320).