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Jul 21, 2011It's this quality that makes the album not just an easy recommendation for listeners old and new, but one of their most fun, accessible, and solid albums since Factory Showroom.
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Jul 19, 2011Besides the band's signature quirky lyrics, Join Us also retains its well-known staccato guitar and keyboard interplay as well as a tendency for crazy-quilt arrangements.
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Jul 29, 2011The band's latest album, Join Us, expresses the group's signature nerd pride with a combination of simplicity and fantasy fit for ex-losers, children and those weird kids in high school.
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Jul 15, 2011Join Us is a throwback to the style of music They Might Be Giants built the first two decades of their career around. At long last, the duo has returned to making geeky adult music for geeky adults.
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Jul 19, 2011Every song teems with surprisingly memorable choruses, melodies, and, well, quirks that prove hard to forget; after such a deluge of stealthy and refined charms, resistance to the TMBG formula becomes futile.
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Jul 21, 2011It's a solid, summery album that more than delivers on the tunes, and the LOLs, and you can't really ask for more than that.
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Jul 18, 2011The songs are novel in both conception and execution, and the band seems aware of the novelty, aware that two to three minutes is just the right length, that quirky and irreverent work best when the song ends before you want it to.
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Jul 18, 2011The curious should still probably go back in the catalogue to Flood, but for the rest, Join Us is a serviceable, albeit inconsistent, stab at shooting for the moon in sheer zaniness.
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Q MagazineAug 16, 2011The trouble is, for all its inventive wordplay and expert pastiches, Join Us swiftly becomes the musical equivalent of that witty, but rather-too-clever male party guest who always ends up going home alone. [Sept. 2011, p. 119]
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Jul 19, 2011while Join Us is lighter on lyrical surrealism than earlier TMBG, it delivers on their well-known gleeful morbidity
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Jul 15, 2011Their wit keeps maturing, but TMBG's gentle weirdness is forever young.
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Jul 19, 2011The weird, eclectic Join Us serves as a refreshing corrective to years of kiddie albums and so-so grown-up discs, and reestablishes Linnell and John Flansburgh as geek-rock explorers of the highest order.
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Aug 3, 2011Cautiously, I submit that Join Us, their 15th album and first non-children's release in four years, has that old-school TMBG feel, as if the Unlikely Rock Band ditched the self-conscious weirdo-geek shtick for a more genuine weirdo-geek non-shtick shtick.
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Jul 21, 2011Overall, there's less headbanging potential here than on their finest moment – 2001's Grammy-winning song Boss of Me from Malcolm in the Middle – but it doesn't matter. This is still a brilliant summer listen.
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Jul 22, 2011Join Us, the band's first non-children's record since 2007, presents standard rock topics in unconventional packages.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 15
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Mixed: 2 out of 15
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Negative: 0 out of 15
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May 21, 2013
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Feb 20, 2013
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Sep 10, 2012