Music Box | Flight of the Conchords

Mike Newmark Columnist

People cried bloody murder when the Flight of the Conchords Season One DVD didn’t include music videos for any of the songs featured in the episodes, but it ended up being a smart move. Rather than release the DVD and its soundtrack contemporaneously, Bret McKenzie, Jemaine Clement and their team of marketers waited for a number of the songs to become certified classics before making them available as standalone entities. Previously, if you wanted to hear the music without subjecting yourself to the pesky television show around it, you had to watch the Conchords’ live sets on YouTube, pick up their puny six-song EP The Distant Future (2007), or fast-forward through the DVD to the places you wished to go. Now, after seven months of waiting, salivating and fast-forwarding, the first Flight of the Conchords full-length album arrives, and two weeks before its release date, it sits on Amazon’s sales charts at a healthy No. 31.

Among college students, Flight of the Conchords enjoys the kind of near-unanimous acclaim shared by The Office and Arrested Development, so it’s safe to assume that most of them fall into one of two camps: the smitten and the uninitiated. For the former, nothing I say in this review is going to stop anyone from buying Flight of the Conchords ; I could rate it five biscuits or 32 orangutans and it wouldn’t make a difference. For the latter, McKenzie and Clement are two musicians who met at college in New Zealand, and in 1998 they formed Flight of the Conchords, billed as “formerly New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo a cappella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo.” After hitting the comedy circuit, they were commissioned for a television show in which they play themselves within a fictional setting, as a “real band” trying to make it in New York. While onstage, the two fall victim to emo and singer-songwriter clichés with an endearing gutlessness, but about twice per episode they jump into their own music videos—parallel universes where they become confident Casanovas and tear recklessly through musical genres as zany and all over the place as those in their billing.

They’re the closest thing our generation has to a Spinal Tap, poking fun at our affinity for wimpy indie rock and our tendency to trawl through the annals of pop to see if our parents were onto something. Flight of the Conchords highlights both, as many of these songs revolve around a core of acoustic guitar while exploring funk (“Business Time”), old school rap (“Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous”), psychedelia (“The Prince of Parties”), and pretty much every tongue-in-cheek genre that exists. It’s a rollercoaster of a musical ride, but it also feels especially like a soundtrack, one that provides only half the story and, therefore, half the fun. Granted, most of these songs were birthed before Flight of the Conchords even had a television contract, but their comedy is so visual and so visually clever that it’s a small wonder how they didn’t begin on the screen. Without the visual, contextual element, you’re often required to meet them partway.

In Flight of the Conchords , context is everything. Their music videos would be little more than posturing were they not juxtaposed with McKenzie and Clement’s “real lives,” with their awkward culture clashes, bungled pickup lines and pathetic live performances. More significantly, they exploit the possibilities of television to help turn their tunes from merely cute to downright uproarious. So while a song such as “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous”—a hilarious tribute to battle-rap’s golden age with the most memorable line in their oeuvre (“They call me the Hiphopopotamus / My lyrics are bottomless...”)—can stand well enough on its own, others thirst for a visual ballast to provide the missing humor. “Foux du Fafa,” for instance, is spineless French pop with Franglish patois for lyrics (“Soup du jour / Camembert / Jacques Cousteau / Baguette”), but it lacks the sun-drenched ’70s cinematography to tie it all together, turning a winsome time warp into a one-punch-line joke (“Parlez vouz français?” “No.”).

On the upside, Flight of the Conchords spotlights what tends to get lost in all of the visual bombast: the music itself. McKenzie and Clement know their instruments and their influences well enough that the homages they craft can be enjoyed purely at surface level. “Parody bands” are always in danger of not being taken seriously, so it’s nice to see one with instrumental chops that can prove the naysayers wrong. But if the music is consistently inspired, the lyrical delivery intermittently falls flat. That Hiphopopotamus line somehow doesn’t ring as true as it should, and the shining lyric from the television version of “Business Time,” (“Tuesday night is the night that we usually go to your mother’s place and I teach her how to use the video machine again, but Wednesday night is the night that we make love”) is here truncated to “Tuesday night we go and visit your mother, but Wednesday we make sweet weekly love,” for some reason.

McKenzie and Clement aren’t the only ones making quizzical decisions; so is their label, Sub Pop. Flight of the Conchords contains most of songs from the show’s first season, but it’s missing “Not Crying,” “If You’re Into It” (both on The Distant Future), and “Cheer Up, Murray” (not available anywhere)—all highlights.

And, like the DVD, Flight of the Conchords is an extremely skeletal proposition: no remixes, no music videos, no new songs pulled from the pipeline. I realize that for Flight of the Conchords devotees, I just did the journalistic equivalent of wasting my breath, as they’ve pre-ordered Flight of the Conchords weeks in advance. It’s probably better that way, since Flight of the Conchords is a completist’s item rather than a new way to enjoy what the band has to offer. For everyone else, I want to gently move the $16 they were going to spend on the CD into their DVD fund, plunk them in front of a television set, play a few of the classic episodes, and watch as they make their way to the camp with the sign marked “smitten.”