Photos and Review by Jeff Palmucci
They Might be Giants stopped by the House of Blues on Friday and Saturday last week revisiting their childhood stomping grounds. As was the case in most recent TMBG shows that I’ve been to, they played both sets of the night. The first highlighted an album (Factory Showroom on Friday and Apollo 18 on Saturday), and the second was basically a mish mash of whatever the hell they wanted to play.
I went to the Saturday show. This was my fifth time covering They Might Be Giants. If you go back and read any of those, you know that I like to keep the articles funny and weird, like the band. After four of these, this time was a little harder. I even tried falling back on ChatGPT. That’s how I know that TMBG songwriting is completely AI free. ChatGPT sucks at humor, at least the kind that these guys put into their songs.
You should trust me on this one. My whole career was in machine learning before I retired to focus on writing long, pointless, meandering online articles. The thing is, TMBG humor is too weird to get a good online training sample. Take a listen to Birdhouse in Your Soul or Dr Worm, both of which were played that night. They’re both awesome in the humor and uniquely strange. The only way an AI could learn that is scraping their personal catalog. It’s big, but maybe a few million tokens? Not enough to properly bizarrofy[1] a frontier model.
The show on Saturday had a lot of humor from the band and bits between songs. This was the second time I saw the bit where they played a song backwards to see if you could guess what it was and “piss off people who were dragged here by their friends.” I didn’t get it, dammit. I’m not giving it away either. You’ll have to go to the show and try yourself.
During Shoehorn With Teeth drummer Marty Beller had the single least impressive drum solo I’ve ever seen, consisting of only three notes. However, he did it with much gravitas.
There were two encores that night, which was both great, and illustrates that you got ripped off if you didn’t get two in your show.
There were a few songs from the new album The World Is to Dig that night, including Wu-Tang. This is their first full album in five years. I sure hope they pick up the pace. Otherwise, our machine overlords are going to be way less funny.
[1] OK, I used ChatGPT for that.