First emerging in the early ’80s, They Might Be Giants were compelling, confounding, and arguably without precedent. They remain, 30 years after the fact, relics of a period in which underground rock’s largely regional character incubated success stories from gifted weirdos across the country. Just as sunbaked desert days helped to produce the druggy haze of the Meat Puppets’ best work, and the Minutemen were products of Southern California’s multi-cultural melting pot of influences, TMBG, with their remarkable combination of free-associative intellectual constructs, indelible hooks, and withering humor always felt like a particularly deranged MIT experiment. Something like a couple of very large brains placed in a blender with a handful of Big Star records, some uniquely tasteless exploitation films, and the entire canon of Russian literature. Early TMBG records are so heavily referential with respect to the musical culture that it can feel a bit like an off-brand, aural actualization of the album art for Sgt. Pepper’s. On the first record alone namechecks run the gamut from Menudo to the Eurhythmics to Elvis Presley to Marvin Gaye and Phil Ochs, to name but a few. Much in the same manner that Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of re-imagining and reordering the cultural space to create new mythologies, TMBG’s brilliance lies in their polymath’s knack for taking in every manner of influence, and eventually bending it to the will of their very particular, and very perverse, imaginations.