Consumer Guide Album

They Might Be Giants: Long Tall Weekend [www.emusic.com, 1999]
The biggest problem with Net-music utopianism is that no matter how fast and convenient downloads get, music itself will continue to exist in, if you'll pardon the expression, real time. That's its very essence. If 1441 minutes of music go up on the Web today, that's a minute more than anyone can hear in that period, period. Might the Net be a useful way for consumers to sample their musical options? Sure. Might it help strapped artists get by? Conceivably. Are there good things there that are unavailable elsewhere? Certainly not as many as in the sum total of specialty shops in our metropolis, although the same may not hold in Wichita. This, however, is one of them. Human song generators whose metier is the miscellany, they're ideally suited to construct a download-only album that isn't an out file taking on airs. Although "They Got Lost" is on last year's live album and patrons of their live shows and dial-a-song service may recognize other tunes, this is as enjoyable a CD as they've released in the '90s. With love to the literal "Operators Are Standing By," it peaks with "Older," which is about real time. A−