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The brilliant–and sure, quirky–alt-rock icons are touring to celebrate the 30 th remembrance of their influential recording’ Flood’
To celebrate the 30 th remembrance of their vex and beloved 1990 album Flood, They Might Be Giants, the Brooklyn-via-Massachusetts alt-rock duo of John Flansburgh( glasses; humorou; guitar, mainly) and John Linnell( no glasses; even droller; accordion, routinely) are learning to play the deep chipped “Sapphire Missile of Pure Love” downward. Meaning physically, message-from-Satan backward. Linnell describes this undertaking, drolly, as a “heroic effort, ” and regards the result thus far as “surprisingly musical.”
He’s joking. He’s half-joking. Because with this band, with this lifestyle, the goofier the idea, the purer the intent and the harder the operate. “John and I have expended hours and hours at this top trying to memorize the backwards words of’ Sapphire Bullet of Pure Love, ’” Linnell shows, chitchatting on the phone in mid-January as the duo, long augmented live by a full banding, prepared to embark on a monthslong Flood-centric national tour. “What we’ve been able to do at recital is sing it holding up poetic expanses in front of our faces, but we still haven’t surmounted the off-book version.”
The original, linear-time “Sapphire Missile of Pure Love” is a 96 -second oddity amid the 18 other confounding and delightful incongruities that forgivenes Flood, with a pleasantly disorienting keyboard loop-the-loop and some modest pots-and-pans percussion and( really !) a little gentle accordion. The piteous texts, sung collectively by both Johns, symmetry whimsy and menace in time-honored They Might Be Monster style: “John, I’ve been bad, and they’re comin’ after me/ Done someone wrong and I fear that it was me.” It’s a bright little jingle; it’s a resigned death knell. Just because you have no idea what it entails( “youve never” do , not exactly) doesn’t mean it ain’t profound.
I told my chap TMBG-obsessive brother-in-law about this playing-it-backward business and he immediately routed me a time-flipped MP3 of the song with the register specify “Evol Erup Fo Stellub Erihppas”; the keyboard loop sounds pretty much the same, and the rest sounds like a drunk Tame Impala singing in German. Godspeed, then, to whichever lucky crowd in whatever random city first gets to hear this splendid monstrosity live. Will that multitude get any advance advising? “Good question, ” Linnell says. “I don’t know. Which would be better? Would it be better to tell people in advance, so they’re ready for that? Maybe we could get parties to video it, and then we’ll leave it to them to overrule the video and watch it backwards. See what kind of job we did. You know? ”
God bless They Might Be Whale, then, for bringing a startling impression of innovation to even their nostalgia play-acts. If you’re going to perform these fellas look backward, then by jove, they’re going to sing backward, too.
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