If you haven’t already managed to stumble across Flight Of The Conchords, it’s about flipping time you aired out the rock you’ve been living under and checked them out. From their various comedy festival appearances to their HBO television series, these guys have been bringing their mix of comedy and genre-hopping Kiwi-folk-pop-hip-hop-soul-rock to a rapidly growing audience. It’s not all piss-takes and giggles, either. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement are a couple of flipping good musicians too.
If you’ve caught the television show you know what to expect. Using their trusty acoustic guitars as a launch-pad, the guys take a crack at an impressive range of genres and situations. Their hilariously understated Inner City Pressure is so well executed that I could easily have been convinced the Pet Shop Boys had guested. On the self-effacing Business Time, Barry White-style crooning takes an amusing look at the male perception of relationship sex. The lads also manage to square the ledger with Bowie, a satirical portrait of David Bowie that calls to mind the Thin White Duke’s own less than flattering musical observations about Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol.
The highlight, though, has to be Robots. A fixture of YouTube and currently doing the rounds on a number of radio stations, Robots is the hysterical acoustic folk pop message from a distance future, the year 2000, that reports that the ‘humans are dead’ and the robots have taken over the world. It even has an awesome binary solo…
Like the TV show, Flight Of The Conchords isn’t riotously funny from start to finish. It doesn’t need to be. The music is good enough to keep things on the happy side of novelty and make this an excellent addition to your Kiwi-folk-pop-hip-hop-soul-rock collection.
Troy Foster