You probably don’t need me to tell you that, following the June debut of their eponymous HBO series, Flight of the Conchords are everywhere. New Zealand folkster-jokesters Jermaine Clement and Bret McKenzie had been steadily building a small, international following for their act for half a decade when they landed a coveted spot on the premium cable channel’s summer lineup. Though few of the low budget shows for which HBO solicits pilots ever make it to the final schedule, Flight of the Conchords has earned its keep, eliciting raves from critics and viewers alike. Personally, the series’ sixth episode, in which David Bowie (played to perfection by Clement) visits McKenzie in his sleep to advise him on body image issues, rates as one of my all-time favorite television experiences.
The songs on The Distant Future are some, but by no means all, of the best to appear on the series. “Business Time,” which opens the EP, is the perfect send-up of those R&B tunes that squares everywhere use to set the mood for a roll in the hay. Clement and McKenzie croon about the world’s least romantic evening, including the sorting of recyclables (“This isn’t part of the foreplay process, but it is still very important”) and the wearing of a stained, oversized t-shirt “from that team-building exercise you did for work.” The night results in a perfunctory, two-minute-long, weekly sex session that is nonetheless the highlight of the narrator’s life. Another highlight is “Robots,” one of the album’s three live tracks. Spoofing mid-century predictions about the future (and, I’d like to think, Styx’s “Mr. Roboto”), the song is set in “the distant future/The year 2000,” when Clement and McKenzie’s robotic voices inform us that “We no longer say ‘yes,’/ Now we say ‘affirmative,’” but “I never say ‘negative.’/ It always brings everyone down.” Eventually, almost halfway through the song, the “robots” remember that they killed off their human masters, experience profound regret for having done it, and then launch into a mean “binary solo” of “zero zero zero zero zero zero one one.”
The only track on the EP that has not appeared on the show is “Banter.” Another live cut, it isn’t a song, but actually just onstage banter, more specifically, banter about banter. Meta-banter, if you will. Flight of the Conchords dissect the concept, noting, pseudo-profoundly, that it is “just a professional version of talking” and then proceed to tell a story about the time they mentioned to an audience in New Zealand that they had been to the bank earlier that day. Though it’s easy to overlook “Banter” in the midst of five tracks that put frat favorites Tenacious D and Ween to shame, it’s indicative of what The Distant Future is and could have been. The album mostly functions as a puzzlingly abbreviated soundtrack to the TV show: separating the music from the videos adds nothing. “Banter” made me long for a full-length live album that would add a concert dimension to my experience of these talented comedian-musicians, instead of just making me want to watch the corresponding episodes of the TV show via On Demand. If they want to keep releasing albums as they continue their HBO series, Flight of the Conchords will need to develop a musical repertoire separate from the songs they incorporate into TV episodes.
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