THE ESCAPE TEAM

The Escape Team is chronically overlooked, and I think that's a genuine shame. Not only is it an interesting album, but it's got fun songs and drum loops to boot. In general, people decry The Escape Team because it's not got the vagueness that other TMBG albums have: it's a concept album, they say, sneering their gaze and running their fingers along their false goatees.

To this, I have three things to say. First off, all albums are concept albums. Second off, Glean. Third off... you want concept albums? Here Come The ABCs, Here Come The 123s, Here Comes Science. That's right, we're back in Disneyland.

Throughout its admittedly short runtime, The Escape Team provides us with a vibrant cast of characters that all seem... somehow flat. They're fun, they've got fun designs, but they're all distinctly pulp tropes. Jackie The Clipper shows us a pulp vilification of a trans woman, Burnice shows us a femme fatale, Dr. Sy Fly gives us the mad scientist... it's all tropes on tropes. It's in this silliness that TMBG gets to flex the muscles that have gone atrophied, to allow themselves to write silly songs again, to play around once more. It's perhaps the most similar TMBG has ever gotten to the kids' albums, especially the Disney Sound stuff.

But something is fundamentally wrong. When we get to John Postal, we have a picture of someone who's withdrawn from the life of violence; looking at the character design of the titular Juan Postal, he's... doing mundane things, despite looking like a horror monster. He's existing outside of the role he was meant to play.

By the time we get to Re-PETE Offender, these commercialized, ridiculously common tropes are played on their head. Recall the duplicate of duplicates, recall — even the price is erased. It's all playing on itself.

When we finally conclude with The Poisonousness, we get a song about a member of the Escape Team saying that they are trapped in this world; saying that they want to dispose of the villainousness, to leave this hell. It ends with I can't tell just how or why, but we'll survive. This seems overly saccharine, but it's ultimately unreliable narration; this is because they will survive, they will persist, because every member of the Escape Team is a trope.

In this way, the members of the Escape Team that this album lists off are all people who want to exist outside of their roles, outside of the fact that they are tropes. But they are undeniably tropes. From there, we know what they are trying to escape; themselves.

When we take this under the metatextual read of They Might Be Giants, that being that TMBG is a band about being a band, we begin to uncover the idea that The Escape Team is a reflection on the Disney Sound kids albums, and the idea that TMBG is an artist for kids. They Might Be Giants knows that it does kids work, and they are proud of it, and they keep it up. But it's distinctly separated; on Spotify, for example, it's under a different artist name.

The Escape Team, then, is a reflection on the idea that they're okay with making kids' albums, and they like their kids' work, but they don't want to be known for it. They want to escape, to run from these silly songs, these strict albums, these tropes. They want to defy their perception, as they always have.