When a friend sent me a YouTube link for some live Flight of the Conchords footage a couple of years ago, I was very skeptical. "I don't like comedy music!" I screeched, flapping my arms up and down. Which I don't. It's very rarely as funny as it believes itself to be, which is always made worse when it inexplicably becomes popular and your co-workers quote it to each other while chortling as if they've just eaten the biggest fucking pie in the world.
So when I watched it and giggled madly the whole way through, I was somewhat surprised. I devoured all YouTube had to offer and thought that was that. Good offbeat comedy rarely travels much beyond it's native country, and I figured that since the duo are from New Zealand I wouldn't be seeing much more. Until the BBC caught on and made a radio series with them. And then the HBO TV series aired, leaving me perturbed. "It won't be as good though!" I howled, kicking small animals into the bushes. "It'll be diluted down for the mainstream American audience!" No offense, like.
Once again surprise reared its quizzical head when the show turned out to be even better. Dry as hell, dark and ever-so-slightly surreal with quality songs. A bizarre tale of a Kiwi novelty folk duo trying to make their way in New York accompanied only by an incompetently self-important manager, a deranged groupie and a deluded, sex-obsessed pawn shop owner. If you have seen it I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted. Unless you are an idiot, in which case I hate you. Go away.
What we have here is the first full release by Flight of the Conchords on Sub Pop, an interesting label choice for something which will inevitably be viewed as the soundtrack to the series despite the material predating it by some way. Stripping their other media formats away from it, what do we have? A collection of songs delivered in a general acoustic style but from a wide variety of different sources, usually lampooning those influences along the way. Oh, and it's funny. Really, really funny. Whether it's the ragga-spearing "Boom" or the bang-on Pet Shop Boys rip of "Inner City Pressure," these boys know their material enough to make it sound like an original single of the genre gone very, very wrong. I'd say that it feels almost a shame that the songwriting skill on display here is 'wasted' on comedy songs, but for once the humor delivers so consistently and precisely that it doesn't feel that way at all.
It's not going to win any prizes for stunning musical innovation, and longtime fans may be puzzled by the exclusion of songs such as "If You're Into It," "Albi The Racist Dragon," and "I'm Not Crying". And I'm certainly not claiming that you'll get as much out of this if you're not a fan of the band already or the show. But it's the only comedy music I've ever heard that can be enjoyed for what it is rather than the general sense of irreverence surrounding it, and the only comedy music I've ever heard that works as well on record as it does in the live setting. At the end of the day, I sincerely doubt that anything I write here will make people pick up the album if they haven't already. But if it makes you curiously search YouTube like the Matt T of two years ago, my job is done.
See also
Pillow Talk, Goldie Looking Chain
