1985 DEMO TAPE

The Twin Quasars of Rock are here! You can order their cassette by mail for only 6 dollars.

Things are about to get very strange for the next week. Very, very strange. The songs on the 1985 Demo Tape are borderline embryonic.

Rather than mentioning most of the songs on this tape — you know most of them, really — I want to talk a bit about the synth-heavy feel of this album. Look, our favorite album is The Coroner's Gambit which was recorded on a boombox with an awful microphone, of course we're going to like this low-fidelity stuff. But the synths here feel like they aren't trying to fake being more than synths, something that feels like it happens on Flood and Apollo 18 to an extent. I like the spartan, pure feel of it all.

Beyond that, Hell Hotel, holy shit. I'm sorry, but how was this one cut? It's absolutely excellent, the enunciation is insane on the well-well-well, it's just a great beat. It feels like a song about having everything, and therefore having nothing; about a hell of your own creation. This theme would get riffed on a lot in later TMBG.

Some of these songs are absolutely tiny. Don't Let's Start is a shell of itself, and yet somehow I love the deeply strange vocal sampling. I think They Might Be Giants almost works better in low-fidelity? The song, I mean — it feels like it's breaking down, running out of momentum before the car even starts. The Day is downright lively on this tape.

I don't know, it's good, go listen to it. This one gets overlooked a lot.