reax music magazine :: music + culture » Reviews » Flight of the Conchords - Flight of the Conchords

This sampling of songs from the New Zealand musical-comedy duo's first season on HBO serves, more than anything, to illustrate how the Conchords differ from the likes of Spinal Tap and Tenacious D. Where those acts use the oversize trappings of arena rock and metal to create huge satirical mythologies, the Conchords are small-scale stylistic parodists, sending up various genres with equal enthusiasm. They rely fairly heavily on the obvious joke of juxtaposing their white-ass geekiness against hip-hop and urban loverman slow jams (“Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous,” “Ladies of the World,” “Mutha'uckas,” “The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room),”  the classic “Business Time”), but also take on '80s synth-pop (“Inner City Pressure”), goofy Middle East-influenced psychedelia (“The Prince of Parties”), misogynist dancehall toasting (“Boom”) and others. Their ability to pepper their broad silliness with smarter, sharper comic details – like the awkward corrections in the conversation that begins “Robots,” and the line about hermaphrodites in “Ladies of the World” that goes “even you must get into you” – is this twosome's greatest asset. But the record suffers from the same shortcoming that afflicts most of its peers: when removed from the context of the larger narrative, the songs, however good, serve as little more than novelty, and the novelty wears thin pretty damn quick. - Scott Harrell