I’ve got to tell you right now, I was more than just a little tempted to do this week’s article on the new They Might Be Giants children’s album, “Here Comes Science.” I wanted to do it really badly, but it was too sad for me. It’s hard to admit in a full article with a really big picture of my face right next to it that I was amused by music about the sun, rainbows and the scientific method, all of which are meant to get children excited about going to school. It really is hard to publicly admit that I liked the album.
So much so that I’d write an article about it thinking that you might be so intrigued that you would actually go out of your way to listen to a kids’ album. It was a sad couple of minutes, but, in the end, as I decided against it, I felt like a grown up, like I had the ability to practice restraint and demonstrate to my peers refined taste and matured views of the world and art. So now, I’m in my room, wearing a tweed sports coat, smoking a pipe and developing my understanding of the human condition and its relationship to rhythm and tonality by listening to Califone’s newest album, “All My Friends Are Funeral Singers.”
The album is itself a very fine example of the Califone tradition with its restrained and sensibly mixed acoustic folk and experimental electronic breakdowns. It’s the kind of thing you can genuinely enjoy and still feel unnecessarily pretentious about. Also, it’s a useful album to put on for a lady late at night when you want to prove that you have emotionally evolved beyond all the other people at the party you just came from.
In fact, I give you my personal guarantee that you will, at the very least, get a cuddle out of her before the sun comes up. And, oh yeah, she’ll swoon hard when songs like “Funeral Singers” and “Brunuel” start to play. They are the kind of things that make the heart swell and the body writhe in hyper-sensitive ways, especially for us 20-something hipsters with easily provoked libidos.
My favorite thing about this album is the way it seamlessly switches from desperate loneliness to sincere nostalgia to fun-freak-folk-hoe-downs. It’s a truly eclectic album without erratic transitions. It is masterfully arranged and composed so that each song has its place within the album as a whole, creating this honestly beautiful and amazing collection of songs.
“All My Friends Are Funeral Singers” also serves as the conceptual soundtrack to a soon-to-be-released film of the same name. The film will be released sometime next year, starring the members of Califone and Angela Bettis (“Girl Interrupted”), and will be accompanied by live performances by Califone during next year’s tour. Written and directed by Califone front man, Tim Rutili, the “AMFAFS” movie looks like a hipstered-out musical version of “The Others” (that movie where Nicole Kidman is a ghost and is stuck in the house, but doesn’t know she’s a ghost and therefore inadvertently terrifies children) and will most likely be good