★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
I have been a devotee of the Church of They Might Be Geniuses for a long, long time. The mid 1980s probably. Maybe longer even than I've worshipped at the altar of the Unblemished Bob. Anyway, that's a way of saying my assessment of this album is perforce a bit biased. As it's a Dial-a-Song compilation of 18 tracks, it's definitely going to be a mixed bag. But the high points of TMBG are high indeed. I like that one song, "Got Getting Up So Down," began life as a Dunkin' Donuts commercial ("left sock, right sock / T-shirt, wristwatch / bus pass, laptop... I got gettin' up so down, I could do it in my sleep"). It says something either about me or about what the Johns are best at writing about that my favorite tracks all seem to be narrated by an insane person who's hallucinating things: "Apophenia," "Sold My Mind to the Kremlin," "It Said Something," and "Shape Shifter."
