If Tenacious D is a ninth grader who just discovered the rockin’ awesomeness of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, then Flight of the Conchords is his college-age brother, broadening his musical tastes away from home and finding that the really cute girls are the ones who hang out in coffeehouses listening to good-looking but sensitive townie dudes play boring folk songs. Fortunately, this undergrad doesn’t want to play boring folk songs — Flight of the Conchords wants to win the ladies’ affection with folk-song parodies!
Or maybe that’s how it started, but the New Zealand duo’s self-titled full-length from Sub Pop (their 2007 EP, The Distant Future, won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album earlier this year) never strays into A Mighty Wind territory. Luckily it never wanders onto “Weird Al” Yankovic’s property either. FOTC’s songs are built on a solid foundation of pop and soul melodies and a genuine love of music, with funny lyrics and subject matter layered on top; if the songs were built the other way around it would just be shoddy construction. By the way, I haven’t seen Flight of the Conchords’ self-titled HBO show. (On a similar note, I didn’t see Tenacious D’s own self-titled HBO show until after I’d heard their self-titled debut album in 2001, but Jack Black and Kyle Gass’s “acoustic metal” duo only made three episodes from 1997 to ‘99, so it wasn’t difficult to watch the complete series in one sitting.) I haven’t seen any YouTube clips from Flight of the Conchords either, so I don’t have any context for the songs on the album apart from the album itself. But that’s okay, because the songs work fine on their own.
