33 rebellions per minute
"Where latitude and longitude collide"
1993
Flop, WHENEVER YOU'RE READY
This is an album They Might Be Giants' Linnell and Flansbergh might have made if, at age 18, they had
discovered that playing loud feedbacky guitars could make even them sexy. Which means that Flop's
exuberant, inventive tunefulness is applied to songs about girlfriends as well as to songs entitled "Parts I +
II" and "Mendel's White Trash Laboratory" and "a Fixed Point", though luckily their girl songs show a
promising snideness: "I haven't got a car, and you haven't got an opinion", or the ridiculous death-march
riff to "You have made mistakes. So I say goodbye". And the indie-rock sound gets to the point where
songs bleed into each other, though that's broken by "A Popular Donkey"'s calliope, "Need Retrograde
Orbit"'s quiet tension, the structural development and the sheer greatness of "Regrets" and "En Route To
The Unified Field Theory". I do realize that musically, this is one of thousands of albums setting
high-pitched male vocals to bubblegrunge rewrites of HELP! and A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. But it's smart
and totally catchy: one of the best. (Important consumer warning: other Flop albums aren't ones of the best
unless you like your pop songs encased in blurry 2-minute flash-floods of consciousness.
Then again, Flop has fans who prefer just that)
Links to other sites on the Web
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
Get your own Free Home Page