Flight of the Conchords 'I Told You I Was Freaky'

I Told You I Was Freaky
Flight of the Conchords
(Subpop)

Many of the songs for the first Flight of the Conchords studio album had been crafted and honed for the stage comedy circuit and the original BBC Radio Series, but were brought to life for the soundtrack to the HBO television series. Judged on its own merits, the album was a superb piece of musical satire, poking fun at some honoured pretensions of a variety of genres: the backwards guitar of the psychedelic-folk number ‘Prince of Parties’; the church choir coda to ‘Ladies of the World’; the perfectly executed pre-censored ‘Mutha-uckas’; and the hollow change-the-world rhetoric of the Marvin Gaye-styled ‘Think About It’ (“At the end of your life / You’re lucky if you die”), with its obligatory a cappella breakdown and out-of-time finger-clicks. The most remarkable thing about the whole affair was that the music was good: narrowing the already thin line between mockery and celebration. Oh and it debuted at No. 1 album on the pop charts in the US.

This by way of preamble to a review of their latest album/TVseries tie-in, I Told You I Was Freaky. The title track is typical of what to expect: the music isn’t as enjoyable, the satire isn’t as sharp, and there’s far more priority on gag lyrics and increasingly inane rhymes. Most of all, it invites unfavourable comparisons to the first album: why start the album with a rap parody when ‘Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous (feat. Rhymenocerous and the Hiphopapoatumus)’ did it all so brilliantly already?

There are a couple of great numbers, all pushed to the back-end of the record for some reason. ‘You Don’t Have To Be A Prostitute’ is a stroke of genius – a literal retelling of ‘Roxanne’ (“Male prostitution seems to be my only option”) – with Bret doing a fabulous Sting and the reggae element pushed to the fore with a steelpan drums solo. ‘Carol Brown’, with its genuinely lovely female harmonies, is probably the closest the duo’s ever come to an earnest pop number. (It was, of course, the one plucked from the album for airplay – is there anything more tiresome than joke-music on the radio?). ‘Too Many Dicks (On the Dance Floor)’ is spot-on too.

But precious few other tracks warrant repeated listens, which probably has a lot to do with a change in approach. Much of the first television series was fashioned out of stand-alone songs that already existed. The second time round, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement had what must have seemed like a luxury: the opportunity to write the episodes first, which they could then write the appropriate songs for. Knowing that, it’s understandable that the new songs aren’t the self-contained bundles of comic perfection they were last time out.

When it comes to the music, the Conchords’ strength has always been parody. Apart from the occasional moment of brilliance, I Told You I Was Freaky comes off like the Conchords’ inadvertent parody on the Difficult (and marginally weaker) Second Album.

Darryn King