“We rarely play for people as sober as you are now,” quipped John Flansburgh at the start of They Might Be Giants’ sold-out show last night at the Parker in Fort Lauderdale, noting that usually, the group plays at rock clubs “beneath our dignity.” But the theater setup, with its expansive stage relative to the cramped confines of the Culture Room, where the band played its previous three SoFla gigs, ended up suiting They Might Be Giants perfectly. The larger space allowed the five-piece touring band, plus a tasty three-piece horn section on a handful of highlights, plenty of room to bring their balance of rock spectacle and avant performance art to an eager audience of multigenerational devotees.
The breadth and diversity of TMBG’s fan base is a testament to the fact that this outfit has been doing its thing for nearly 45 years—they formed the year I was born, in fact, in 1982—with the two core creatives, guitarist Flansburgh and keyboardist, accordion player and turntablist John Linnell, having long settled into their roles as performers: Linnell the retiring, cerebral co-leader, Flansburgh the gregarious emcee, a yin-and-yang chemistry that sparkled through the often self-effacing humor that surfaced during the band’s two-set, nearly 30-song concert.
The group has focused part of its shows on specific albums from its decades-long discography, and the Fort Lauderdale audience was treated to selections from Mink Car, “an album nobody bought,” per Flansburgh’s slight hyperbole. At the risk of reinforcing this perception, the suite of songs to open the show included the only times the performance sagged. “Hovering Sombrero,” a ditty the band admits it didn’t rehearse prior to the performance, did feel more than a little ramshackle. But even the tunes from one of TMBG’s lesser efforts benefited from the urgency and kismet of live performance, from the chugging guitar-and-bass interplay of the rousing sing-a-long “Older” to the title track’s cool lounge vibe, enhanced by the horn section.
As the first set wound to a close and the Mink Car material gave way to the more practiced tunes, the horns would make their mark on the staple “Doctor Worm,” which included a witty blast of brassy punctuation from trombonist Dan Levine; and “Let Me Tell You About My Operation,” whose rollicking sense of swing evoked a Jazz Age romp.
The obdurate sense of weirdness that has defined the band’s aesthetic from its inception is still a part of the TMBG experience, with results both self-indulgent—the group’s backwards performance of “Sapphire Bullets of True Love,” reimagined as the shortened “Stellub,” is once again a waste of precious set-list time—and inspired: During the offbeat percussive clangor of the unexpected TikTok sensation “Stuff is Way,” Flansburgh aimed a GoPro at his teeth for the length of this short song. Perhaps there’s a social media rationale for this decision that’s beyond my ken, but I just found it agreeably strange.
I can’t say enough about the horn section, whose work elevated otherwise small-band outings into anthems, most prominently on “Museum of Idiots” and especially the perennial concert centerpiece “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” This one started with a sax-and-drum duet that gradually began to evoke the song’s memorable melody, and built into a freak-out among the three horns, whose controlled chaos brought this demure audience, despite being tethered to seats, into its closest approximation of a frenzy, one that continued through four or five extraordinary codas from trumpeter Mark Pender.
The encores offered up a trio of bona fide classics, with Linnell inserting a snippet of the Sun Ra Arkestra’s “Rocket Number Nine Takeoff for the Planet Venus” into the breakdown of “Particle Man,” a decision aided by Levine’s spooky, interstellar euphonium work. The audience remained on its feat as “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “The Guitar” sent us home with smiles as wide and infectious as the band’s music.
SET 1
Man, It’s So Loud in Here
Older
Bangs
Cyclops Rock
Hovering Sombrero
Mink Car
Wicked Little Critta
Drink
Mink Car
Working Undercover For the Man
Doctor Worm
Let Me Tell You About My Operation
Shoehorn
Stellub
Brontosaurus
SET 2
Memo to Human Resources
Wearing a Raincoat
Stuff is Way
Science is Real
Last Wave
Museum of Idiots
Where Your Eyes Don’t Go
Call You Mom
Damn Good Times
Istanbul (Not Constantinople
ENCORE 1
Triangle Man
Birdhouse in Your Soul
ENCORE 2
The Guitar
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