MELODY PT. 2

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for They Must Be Giants.

Hammering in the newfound musical confidence, Live!! New York City 10/14/94 opens with one of TMBG's slowest tracks, O, Do Not Forsake Me. Brian Doherty's presence on the drums is noted and immediately distinguishes this from prior TMBG live sets; it makes the entire thing flow. Don't Let's Start, a song that did not have drums on it, massively benefits from its presence.

This is the point where live versions of TMBG tracks begin to gain parity with their album versions in complexity and instrumentation, for certain. Sleeping In The Flowers sounds like it could have been the version straight off John Henry.

The fact that these songs do effectively get "redone" every time they're played is interesting in this era, given the new arrangement. The live versions of each of these songs sounds massively different due to the presence of horns, drums, and the general lack of synthesizers that's characteristic of John Henry and later Factory Showroom. I quite like a lot of these live versions, even if they suffer inherently from lack of post-production.

Something that's characteristic of a lot of early TMBG, The Pink Album and Lincoln especially, is that of synthesizers, which are notably absent here. The almost "broken" gating on Ana Ng is a very distinct part of that song which works to create that song's atmosphere, and it's really difficult to mimic live. The drums on it are very interesting to the point where it's remarked upon in the recording. I like the crackling done manually with stupid vocal noises, though.

God I love horns. I mean that'll show up later, but god I love horns. Birdhouse In Your Soul has a lot of horns on this one and I think I like this version more than the studio one.

Anyway, this is the part where I have to mention Doctor Worm, which is an inexplicable addition to Severe Tire Damage, a 1998 post-Elektra live album. This is still firmly in the 1st era of TMBG that we talk about here, it's pre-Long Tall Weekend. Anyway, Doctor Worm is good. It's like an adult children's tune, it's wonderful, it's important. Doctor Worm is a god damned pillar of culture nowadays. What do you want me to say about Doctor Worm? I think what you want me to say about Doctor Worm is more of a reflection about you.

Doctor Worm is a window into the soul. Doctor Worm is about 9/11, it's about the second presidency of Donald J. Trump, it's about bleeding after you inject DIY estrogen, it's a metamodern deconstructive postnarrative postmodern postposting epic about the destruction of the barrier between church and state. It's the most important thing to ever exist. Doctor Worm is about the emotion you have when you're out of tissues and you're bleeding from your nose and so you go into the bathroom but there isn't toilet paper and suddenly you really need to shit and your bidet is broken and so you just kind of let it happen, you just sit there and cry, fluids being removed from you, worms, so to speak, the WORMS, they're coming, they're right behind you, I saw Walt Disney's corpse being eaten, am I even here, where am I, how did I g

A lot of the tracks on Severe Tire Damage are a lot faster and more fun than their original versions, even if they lose something. By now, I've heard three live versions of Why Does The Sun Shine? today, a track that I don't even care for very much, and it's by far my favorite version of this song. The intonation in the Johns' voices are evidently trying to mix up these tracks, given the rampant popularity of Flood already elevating a lot of these to the "background radiation" that we experience today.

Severe Tire Damage is a very strange album because it's not a "live album" in the traditional sense, given that it doesn't compile a live set. In fact, it's kind of a hodgepodge of a lot of live recordings; see the TMBW page for more on that.

I love the version of Ana Ng on here, I love the version of They Got Lost on here. First Kiss is great, especially since I try to ignore Mink Car most of the time, meaning it's a welcome surprise how good it is. Each of these tracks have massively different variations, which is very reflective of the rapid experimentation of the Melody era at large.

The About Me and on run, including the Planet of the Apes tracks, is fun. I can't really say much about it. It certainly does tie in TMBG's obsession with pop culture.