They Might Be Giants Celebrate Flood, A Few Years Late, at the Bowery Ballroom

The New York rock band They Might Be Giants has been around long enough—40 years and counting—to escape the pigeonholing of a particular scene or genre. They were a genuine alternative long before “alternative rock” was a section in mall record stores, a form of New Wave well after the wave had crested, and (despite spending the ’90s on a major label) an indie act long before Taylor Swift used it as a sarcastic pejorative. Co-founders John Linnell and John Flansburgh are peerless, in the sense that they’ve outlasted so many other bands that began around 1982, as well as the bands that came to be loosely and sometimes nonsensically associated with their brand of cleverly experimental rock music.
Still, the COVID-19 pandemic tested plenty of acts’ mettle, and seemed especially disruptive for such a prolific act, with such a beloved live show. TMBG did release a new record (and accompanying hardcover) called Book in 2021, but a tour intended to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their seminal gateway album Flood back in 2020 mostly went the way of other things scheduled for 2020. A bunch of the shows were pushed back later in the year, then into 2021, then into 2022—and then Flansburgh was injured in a car crash, kicking a bunch dates into 2023.
By the time They Might Be Giants took the stage at the Bowery Ballroom this past weekend, Flood was 33 years old, and the shows could just have readily celebrated the 30th birthday of Apollo 18, their 1992 follow-up that’s at least as good; or the 20th birthday of the less-heralded but astonishingly eclectic 2001 release Mink Car; wait another year, and the underrated pair of John Henry and The Spine will be turning 30 and 20, respectively. When you cross the 20-album threshold, anniversaries are bound to turn up just about everywhere.
But these shows were announced back in 2019 as Flood celebrations, and at the outset of their Friday show, first in a weekend-long, three-night stand, Flansburgh almost immediately announced that they would, indeed, play all of the Flood songs as promised—and also, in his perfect frontman deadpan, that all other promises related to the show would be broken. (He was probably joking, but could have been referring to the fact that some of these shows were once billed as featuring songs from Flood and Mink Car, the latter of which was semi-recently rereleased on vinyl. Ultimately only two songs, the single “Man, It’s So Loud In Here” and the oddity “Wicked Little Critta,” made it into the Friday show; the Saturday show acquiesced with half a dozen Mink Car songs.)
They Might Be Giants have been periodically doing Flood-themed shows for decades at this point, which has given them time to find variously novel ways of approaching the task: playing the tracklist in reverse, mixing and matching album sides, and shuffling all of the songs across the two-set format they’ve been using for most of their shows since 2015. That last one was more or less the approach this weekend—though the Sunday show, unseen by me, offered one pure Flood-in-order set, followed by an eclectic Flood-free one.