With Mike Post handling the music for both tracks on this single, the A-side is a Joey Scarbury piece only due to his vocals. Despite sounding a bit like elevator music in parts, and having significant cheesiness to the singing and guitar, the “Greatest American Hero” theme is a powerful earworm, thanks to its hooky chorus and melody. The “Hill Street Blues” theme is much more sedate in comparison, though it brings in the same chintzy electric guitar, but it shows a greater level of nuance to Post’s song-writing. A neat little piece of ‘80s pop culture ephemera.
Packing five remixes of the title track, this maxi-single opens up with the “Tee’s Freeze Mix”, which drops vocal slices from the original mix into a 4/4 house beat with some glimmering synth touch-up. “Tee’s In House Dub” follows, playing with the percussion a bit and layering in a new funky synth loop, but otherwise following the pattern of the first mix. Then “Tee’s Capella” wraps up the A-side by stripping away everything but the sampled vocals, without cutting out the stretches of silence between them.
On the B-side, “The Warren Rigg Microwave Mix” also follows the simple house route, but includes some bongo-sounding beats and techno-ish synth stabs and piano loops, with a few beat-ramps livening things up considerably more than Todd Terry’s mixes. “The Warren Rigg Instrumental” serves up the same song again, with the inconsequential vocal samples dropped. All around, it’s fairly boring, with little connection or inspiration from the base song apparent, and ends up feeling more like a contractual obligation pushed by Elektra executives than something anyone involved had actual interest in doing.
On their sixth studio album, They Might Be Giants adapt the full-band set-up of their previous album, John Henry, to song-writing more in line with the subject matter of earlier LPs. Self-consciously quirky to a degree that seems a bit desperate at times (the forced retro-funk of opening track “S-E-X-X-Y”, for example), the band rambles through topics of drunkenness, their own vocal qualities, metal detectors, President Polk, and pop chart jockeying, with a layer of detachment insulating them from anything that might bite back too hard in their direction.
Instrumentally, though, the band comes off much stronger. While the keyboards are held in reserve for most of the songs, their occasional movement to the fore (e.g., “Metal Detector” and “Your Own Worst Enemy”) lead to some of the most striking moments, with other touches, like a singing saw in “James K. Polk”, hinting at the diversity of sound sources TMBG used in their earlier days. Otherwise, the arrangements feel a bit restricted by the need to use guitar, bass, and drums in all the songs, inhibiting the more creative deployments that might have been possible with more selective usage of each. A few nimble turns of phrase here and there pick up the lyrical slack somewhat, but in general, the pacing and plodding meters make the words feel drained of spontaneity and enthusiasm. Not fully bad, but certainly indicative of the downward slide the rest of the band’s catalog would take.
For their second studio album, Justice shed the nocturnal atmosphere of † in favor of peppier moods and song styles which draw from ‘80s pop prog, a la Genesis, by way of spangly electric guitar wankery and pseudo-spiritual posturing and shallow sociological pondering. Though they keep the short audio cuts and strong beats of the first album, the overt sampling is lower, and the synths generally feel more hammered-down in comparison to the buzzy aggression of their earlier usage. Those changes don’t keep the band from turning out several memorable tunes, though, even if the earworminess comes down to a hooky main riff over the full song’s shaping more often than not.
That lackluster song-writing seems all the more strange in the face of the apparent care for arranging the tracks within the album, with a loose narrative told through song titles and a separated intro for one of the central songs. The production work is stellar, though, and a trio of guest vocalists add to the grand assembly vibes, but in the end, it feels a little too aimless and overwrought to fit either its affected antiquity or wallowings in retro-pop excess.
Scrambled Brains 