It's easy, in theory, to write educational pop songs for kids-- just set a bunch of facts to a simple tune-- but it's incredibly tough in practice. A good educational record has to make kids want to hear it over and over, until the intended lesson sinks in, but it also has to make their parents not want to stab themselves in the ears on the thirty-seventh play. They Might Be Giants found a new niche for themselves with their second children's album, 2005's Here Come the ABCs: Their goofy-little-tunes engine was on precisely the right setting to hold the attention of goofy little people, and the formal constraints of writing songs about letters and the alphabet spurred the Johns' inventive impulses. There were still too many half-developed throwaways, but they came through with some genuinely funny conceits like "Can You Find It?" and "Alphabet of Nations", the latter of which actually ended up on their set lists at shows for grown-ups.
The video version of ABCs went gold, so they've come through with a sequel-- this time, naturally, it's a set of songs about numbers. The high water mark in that category is still Multiplication Rock, an ingenious set of three-minute tunes written by Bob Dorough for the "Schoolhouse Rock" Saturday-morning cartoons in the early 70s: perhaps you've heard De La Soul sampling "Three Is a Magic Number" or the Lemonheads' cover of "My Hero, Zero". TMBG's number-songs, though, aren't anywhere near as neatly crafted, and the problem comes down to the fact that they simply aren't math guys. They're language guys, and they only really have a use for numbers as linguistic constructs. Dorough's Multiplication Rock songs worked because they were about the mathematical properties of numbers, and the Giants' mostly just incorporate the names of numbers. The lyrics to the John Linnell-sung "Figure Eight" cover the same territory as the Dorough song of the same name-- that "skate" rhyme is, admittedly, pretty obvious-- but Dorough also managed to throw in its multiplication table all the way up to 96, and TMBG don't get much beyond the shape of the numeral.
If there's a song from 123s that the Giants' older fans are likely to embrace, it's probably "Seven Days of the Week", a deeply daffy singalong in praise of indolence with the parping, galumphing beat they adopted back in the "Particle Man" days. Beyond that, the keepers are "Eight Hundred and Thirteen Mile Car Trip", a headlong one-minute rocker, and "Nine Bowls of Soup", a deadpan conversation with an icthyosaur that's a conceptual cousin to Ivor Cutler's "Bicarbonate of Chicken" and also gives John Linnell the excuse to sing "icthyosaur" repeatedly.
The rest, though, is a wearying slurry of not-quite-clever-enough lyrics and brightly colored plastic genre pastiches-- Giants by, well, numbers. "Zeroes" starts with a cute bossa nova riff but never goes anywhere with it; "High Five!" does the same thing with Eurodisco, and throws in a bridge copped from Devo; "Ooh La! Ooh La!" is dreadful fake jumprope funk. The title of "Triops Has Three Eyes" is almost its entire conceit (near the end, it's replaced by "tripods have three legs"). "Ten Mississippi" might be passable as a bit of "Sesame Street" filler-- three funny voices singing "one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi..." in turn-- but it's hard to bear more than once. To their credit, the Johns perpetually sound enthusiastic. ("I don't even know Spanish! But I'm gonna sing it in Spanish!" declares John Flansburgh in the middle of "I Can Add", before doing just that.) But every bouncy tunelet whose catchiness isn't paired with depth or wit lowers the most crucial number on the album, its Parental Ear-Stabbing Index.
There's also a DVD version of the album, featuring cute animated (and felt-puppet) videos for all of the songs. The two-year-old critic in the house sat raptly in front of it, although he lost interest during the two TMBG-written Mickey Mouse jingles tacked on at the end (regrettably, they're also on the CD). Then he asked to hear Multiplication Rock again.
