Music - Oddities

All Samuels Public Library cardholders are eligible for three free downloads a week from Freegal, a massive online database containing over 500,000 songs.  Sifting through such an enormous selection of music can be a daunting task, so we here at Samuels have decided to offer a few suggestions for the overwhelmed (or new) Freegal user.  This week we've chosen three artists known for being slightly off-kilter:  
 

They Might Be Giants

"Everything Right is Wrong Again"

From Then: The Earlier Years

They Might Be Giants have been going strong for over twenty-five years now, but they’ve never quite been able to recapture the magical charm of their earliest recordings.  “Everything Right is Wrong Again” kicks off their first album with all their trademarks: cleverly quirky lyrics, hummable melodies, and bizarre pop culture references.  (For extra credit: Check out the DVD of The Long, Long Trailer, the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz movie mentioned in the song.)    

  

Ween  
"Hey There Fancypants" 
 From Quebec 

With their truly strange sense of humor and manic genre-hopping, Ween is kind of like a trippier version of They Might Be Giants. Quebec effortlessly jumps from Motörhead-like metal to sixties prog to California country-rock to psychedelic jams with gleeful abandon. "Hey There Fancypants," one of the album's funniest moments, has a jaunty English music hall feel to it, at times reminiscent of Queen or The Beatles (or even Les Paul and Mary Ford with a drum machine). The song title alone makes me laugh.

"Weird" Al Yankovic

"Whatever You Like"

From Alpocalypse

Though conventional opinion holds that only 13-year-old boys enjoy "Weird" Al songs, I am going to go on record as saying I am well past my teen years and I still love listening to his outrageous parodies. You don't have to be familiar with the original T.I. song to enjoy "Whatever You Like" and its hilarious satire of the bling culture espoused by so many rappers. Trust me, you'll giggle out loud when Al, bragging about his supply of Top Ramen, says, "You want it, I got it, go get it, just heat it/ Dump a flavor packet on it and eat it."