Leaked: Flight of the Conchords Album Delivers Too Many Old Favorites

Official release date: April 22

The verdict: With the second season of their HBO show set to drop sometime later this year, Flight of the Conchords are releasing an album next week on Sub Pop. As big fans of the band in particular and the quotable comedy-rock album in general (“I’m gonna hump you … sweetly�), we regret to report that the results are mixed. Not in the usual album-review sense of “mixed,� though, meaning that there are some good songs and some crap. Everything’s quite funny, and the songs stand up musically as genre parodies ranging from faux-Innervisions Stevie Wonder (“Children on the street … killing each other using knives and forks / Calling each other names like dork“), faux–French pop (“Foux du Fafa,� in which it becomes clear that the singer doesn’t actually know French), and faux–sensitive balladry (“Just because I’m in a novelty band doesn’t mean it’s all about poontang�). But they’re all old songs!

One would expect the band’s label, Sub Pop, to be a little more new-media-savvy — when Tenacious D, for example, released their self-titled debut in 2001, a compilation made sense: Tenacious D had great word of mouth, but the only people who had access to their songs were Mr. Show–DVD completists. But Flight of the Conchords in 2008 are considerably more exposed than Tenacious D was in 2001. Even leaving aside file-sharing issues, all these songs are available on the recently released FOTC season-one DVD. And although Tenacious D mixed in new, obviously-tossed-off-but-still-hilarious songs and skits to create an appropriately nonsensical story arc on their album, Flight of the Conchords (or at least the version we downloaded) is completely new-content-free. Long story short? It doesn’t look to be “Business Time� for Jemaine and Brent next week. (Har!) —Ben Mathis-Lilley