Flood (They Might Be Giants album)
Flood is the third studio album by American alternative rock duo They Might Be Giants, released in January 1990. Flood was the duo's first album on the major label Elektra Records. It generated three singles: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Istanbul ", and the domestic promotional track "Twisting".
The album is generally considered to be the band's definitive release, as it is their best-selling and most recognizable album, and is regarded by some as one of the best albums of the 1990s. Despite minimal stylistic and instrumental differences from previous releases, Flood is distinguished by contributions from seasoned producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. Band members John Linnell and John Flansburgh also took advantage of new equipment and recording techniques, including unconventional, home-recorded samples, which were programmed through Casio FZ-1 synthesizers. The album was recorded in New York City at Skyline Studios, which was better equipped than studios the band had worked in previously.
Promotion for Flood included television appearances, promotional videos, and an international tour. The album's mainstream promotion and success contributed to its status as the band's most well known album. Many fans, including young viewers of Tiny Toon Adventures, were first exposed to They Might Be Giants's music through Flood.
The album was initially issued on CD, LP, and cassette. Upon its release, Flood was met with praise from critics and achieved moderate success on sales charts. In 2013, the album was reissued as part of a CD series spanning They Might Be Giants' four Elektra releases. In 2014, it was reissued on LP in Europe by Music On Vinyl and in the United States by Asbestos Records for Record Store Day and Black Friday, and it was reissued again on LP in 2015 and in 2023 on the band's label, Idlewild Recordings.
Background
Flood was They Might Be Giants' first release on a major label. Elektra Records approached the band in 1989 following the unexpected success of their second album, Lincoln, which was released on the independent Bar/None label. The record deal that Elektra presented was largely due to the work of Susan Drew, an A&R worker who had been following the band since 1986. Because of her confidence, the band was given an extensive level of creative control over their projects, in addition to the ability to take advantage of the label's resources. Although They Might Be Giants recorded the album as a duo, they were joined by several guest musicians on brass and string instruments. The band also enlisted Alan Bezozi to help program some of the electronic drums for the album.Recording and production
The album was recorded in the fall of 1989 at Skyline Studios in New York City. Skyline was only a few blocks away from the Public Access Synthesizer Studio, where the band had recorded their previous albums. Alan Bezozi and John Flansburgh worked together to create atypical drum tracks, including one that samples the sound of Flansburgh's kitchen sink and refrigerator being struck with a drum stick. An Alesis SR-16 drum machine was used to program the drums.Two-thirds of the album's budget was exhausted for the production of four songs: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Your Racist Friend", "We Want a Rock", and "Istanbul ". These four tracks were produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley.
Style and composition
Like many of They Might Be Giants' early releases, Flood features a range of stylistic eclecticism. The press release for the album notes the "rock rave-up 'Twisting' ... the inflected 'Lucky Ball & Chain' ... the existential oom-pah of 'Particle Man'", and "tender night-light metaphor and melody" of the lead single, "Birdhouse in Your Soul". Jon Pareles wrote for The New York Times that the album "shrug off most typecasting". He added that through releases like Flood, They Might Be Giants and a new wave of alternative musicians were gainsaying the standard practice of sticking to only one genre.Regardless of the genre employed, They Might Be Giants are noted for unconventional lyrics, characterized by "bizarre" cleverness. Flood includes abundant examples of this style, manifested in unusual subject matter, unreliable narrators, and wordplay. However, John Linnell and Flansburgh took care to avoid using humor excessively, acknowledging the requirement that recorded music withstand repeated listens without losing value. Linnell has pointed out that in general, he writes melodies prior to writing lyrics. This creates the challenge of fitting the appropriate syllables and stresses into each line; often, demos were recorded with dummy lyrics to simplify the process. Linnell's melodies are often based around scales. D. X. Ferris, with commentary from John Linnell and John Flansburgh, outlined each individual track from Flood in a retrospective article published in Rolling Stone.
"Theme From Flood" acts as a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the album, and it is regarded by scholars Elizabeth Sandifer and Alex Reed to be one of the first in a recurring trend of processional tunes composed by John Linnell. It is followed by the album's lead single, "Birdhouse in Your Soul". Although the melody for "Birdhouse" was written years prior to the lyrics, the lyrics were "shoehorned in to match the melody", according to Linnell. The narrative is given from the point of view of a child's nightlight. According to John Linnell, the song was almost wrecked when he attempted to underscore it with a more dramatic drum track. Producers Winstanley and Langer opposed this decision and the drum track was scrapped. Linnell speculates that had this not been the case, the entire album might have suffered. Reed and Sandifer also note that the song makes an unanticipated jump from the key of C major to E-flat major and then back to C major. The track's later shifts to F-sharp minor and A major lead to the division of the octave into equal intervals. Reed and Sandifer call Flood in general "modular" in its movement between musical ideas, which they accredit partly to its largely digital composition: the band's MIDI sequencer made it easy to transpose sections of a song out of the original key.
File:Turkey-3019 - Hagia Sophia.jpg|thumb|right|"Istanbul " references both the current and previous names for modern-day Istanbul.
"Lucky Ball and Chain" employs the unreliable narrator motif, according to Linnell. Influenced by the country-western musical tradition, the song is a "simple regret song" dealing with "the one that got away". The fourth track and second single, "Istanbul ", a cover of the 1953 original, was added by Flansburgh and Linnell to their repertoire in the early 1980s to lengthen their live sets. From that point, it evolved from a folk-inspired cover to the baroque pop rendition that appears on Flood. A Casio FZ-1 synthesizer was used to perform the song in the studio. "Dead", described by Rolling Stone as "one of TMBG's most abstract and personal songs", follows the story of someone dying and then being "reincarnated as a bag of groceries". According to Linnell, "The dreamlike relationship between returning expired groceries and returning from the grave after you expire appealed to me."
"Your Racist Friend", produced by Langer and Winstanley, is a politically charged song which follows a fairly straightforward narrative. The song, which depicts a social conflict, is considered to be the band's most clear "political statement". On the other hand, the accordion-tinged "Particle Man" lightheartedly chronicles the disputes of four characters, the titular Particle Man, Universe Man, Person Man, and Triangle Man. Linnell has claimed that the character Triangle Man was inspired by Robert Mitchum's appearance in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter. The final single, "Twisting", was selected over "Your Racist Friend", in part because it was more lyrically ambiguous. The song references both The Young Fresh Fellows and The dB's, two groups that influenced the sound of the track itself. Flansburgh has noted that, while recording the song, Bezozi accidentally erased the entire drum track for "Twisting". Flansburgh then had to recreate the track from scratch. The cryptic "We Want a Rock" features a violin performance by Mark Feldman, and "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" revolves around petty concerns and their importance "when everything else is going haywire". "Hearing Aid" features the mixing of standard They Might Be Giants sounds with an Arto Lindsay guitar solo and vacuum cleaner synth sounds, experimentations that Flansburgh found difficult to achieve.
"Minimum Wage", which features only those two words, saw the band dabbling in sampling. The sound of the whip was crafted in the studio when the band was unable to find a suitable stock sound effect; the effect was a composite of a wind sound from Linnell's Moog keyboard and the crack of a wet towel, courtesy of Roger Moutenot. "Letterbox", which was also considered as a potential single from the album, was another track that had been in live setlists years prior to the release of the album. For "Whistling in the Dark", Flansburgh and Linnell wanted the bass drum to be extremely pronounced, although they were later unhappy with the result. Linnell noted that, lyrically, the song is about two men who engage in a fight, only for the listener to soon learn that they are both in prison. "Hot Cha!" references the name of a wooden horse in the Parker Brothers board game Derby Day; musically, the song is a mix of eclectic sounds, samples, and unique recording methods. In the cheerful tune "Women and Men", the band examines human reproduction from a "disengaged view", and "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" takes its title from a Mahavishnu Orchestra album cut of the same name. "They Might Be Giants" operates as the band's manifesto and was inspired by The Monkees song " The Monkees". Flood concludes with "Road Movie to Berlin", which was written by John Flansburgh in Germany in 1989. The song deals with the clash between absurdism and existentialism that the band encountered while touring Europe. Flansburgh's voice was slowed down for this song, an effect that he later called "creepy". Due to the haste with which the final portion of the album was recorded, the band accidentally forgot to include an entire verse of the song in the finished product; Linnell and Flansburgh felt that they did not have the time to fix it, so the mistake remained. The song also makes use of "synthetic or sampled" trumpet sounds, one of which was also included in "Birdhouse in Your Soul".