7/27/2023 0 Comments Rolling stone flood reviewWhich would be better? Would it be better to tell people in advance, so they’re ready for that? Maybe we could get people to video it, and then we’ll leave it to them to reverse the video and watch it backwards. Will that crowd get any advance warning? “Good question,” Linnell says. Godspeed, then, to whichever lucky crowd in whatever random city first gets to hear this splendid monstrosity live. I told my fellow TMBG-obsessive brother-in-law about this playing-it-backward business and he immediately sent me a time-flipped MP3 of the song with the file name “Evol Erup Fo Stellub Erihppas” the keyboard loop sounds pretty much the same, and the rest sounds like a drunk Tame Impala singing in German. Just because you have no idea what it means (you never do, not exactly) doesn’t mean it ain’t profound. The plaintive lyrics, sung jointly by both Johns, balance whimsy and menace in time-honored They Might Be Giants fashion: “John, I’ve been bad, and they’re comin’ after me / Done someone wrong and I fear that it was me.” It’s a bright little jingle it’s a resigned death knell. The original, linear-time “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” is a 96-second oddity amid the 18 other confounding and delightful oddities that grace Flood, with a pleasantly disorienting keyboard loop and some modest pots-and-pans percussion and (indeed!) a little gentle accordion. “What we’ve been able to do at rehearsal is sing it holding up lyric sheets in front of our faces, but we still haven’t mastered the off-book version.” “John and I have spent hours and hours at this point trying to memorize the backwards lyrics of ‘Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love,’” Linnell explains, chatting on the phone in mid-January as the duo, long augmented live by a full band, prepared to embark on a monthslong Flood-centric national tour. Because with this band, with this lifestyle, the goofier the idea, the purer the intent and the harder the work. Linnell describes this undertaking, drolly, as a “heroic effort,” and regards the result thus far as “surprisingly musical.” Meaning physically, message-from-Satan backward. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their baffling and beloved 1990 album Flood, They Might Be Giants, the Brooklyn-via-Massachusetts alt-rock duo of John Flansburgh (glasses droll guitar, primarily) and John Linnell (no glasses even droller accordion, frequently) are learning to play the deep cut “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” backward.
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