Whether you’re a longtime fan or you’ve never heard They Might Be Giants, Nanobots has something for everyone.
At times, Nanobots feels like Join Us' more melancholy flip side, and even if this album isn't quite as immediate as the one before it, it shows how They Might Be Giants can continue in the vein they've excelled at for decades and build on it, too.
They Might Be Giants aren’t reinventing themselves - they don’t need to - but it’s still a fresh and quirky album that will appeal to anyone with a bit of energy to burn, a hankering for ironic, tongue-in-cheek commentary, or a love of anything geeky.
In short, it provides everything fans would hope for in spades. These are indeed the Giants of old.
Nanobots’ nano-pop arguably takes the trait a little too far, squeezing 25 songs into 48 minutes – including a second-half run of four tracks totalling just 48 seconds, each little more than a witty one-liner and an orphaned melody fragment.
Nanobots sounds like old-school, duo-style TMBG (catchy pop heroics mixed with jingle-length songlets) made by a full band.
The overall finish of the LP is spoiled, however, by an overabundance of short, incomplete musical ideas, many of which sound like rejected jingles for Sesame Street.
Things are less enjoyable when musical boundaries are pushed – and at 25 songs long, albeit with nine of them shorter than a minute, it’s a joke that wears thin.
This is a pretty good album. "You're on Fire" is one that starts the record off with a bang and this energy continues through the first six tracks, with the exception of "Black Ops". The Insect Hospital Suite is okay, however "Nouns" and the titular "Insect Hospital" are wonderful. "The Darlings of Lumberland" is such an amazing track featuring one of the only appearances of the elusive contra-alto clarinet in a conventional record. ... read more
Nanobots is the They Might Be Giants album that started an internet dialogue between me and a college friend that it turns out I didn't actually go to college with (It's a long story). He was in an area where he couldn't have a good nerdy conversation about the quality of a new They Might Be Giants album with fellow nerds. My friend absolutely loved the back-to-basics approach of the album. Being The Else was my favorite "modern" album of theirs I missed the production level of ... read more
1 | You're on Fire 2:42 | 95 |
2 | Nanobots 2:46 | 86 |
3 | Black Ops 3:12 | 78 |
4 | Lost My Mind 2:50 | 89 |
5 | Circular Karate Chop 2:56 | 86 |
6 | Call You Mom 3:07 | 77 |
7 | Tesla 2:05 | 50 |
8 | Sleep 0:43 | 63 |
9 | Stone Cold Coup d'État 2:57 | 90 |
10 | Sometimes a Lonely Way 2:41 | 30 |
11 | Destroy the Past 0:16 | 50 |
12 | 9 Secret Steps 1:56 | 65 |
13 | Hive Mind 0:06 | 57 |
14 | Decision Makers 0:16 | 49 |
15 | Nouns 0:17 | 73 |
16 | There 0:09 | 52 |
17 | Insect Hospital 1:30 | 67 |
18 | Tick 0:12 | 46 |
19 | Replicant 2:56 | 85 |
20 | The Darlings of Lumberland 3:21 | 76 |
21 | Great 0:53 | 55 |
22 | Stuff Is Way 1:37 | 75 |
23 | Icky 2:33 | 89 |
24 | Too Tall Girl 2:35 | 50 |
25 | Didn't Kill Me 0:24 | 53 |