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Flight Of The Conchords: I Told You I Was Freaky

By Genevieve Koski | October 20, 2009 | 5:00am

TV Reviews Music

Flight Of The Conchords: I Told You I Was Freaky

Like its predecessor, the new Flight Of The Conchords disc functions mostly as a soundtrack, collecting 13 tracks that were already aired out on the comedy duo’s HBO show and sold on iTunes, which offered the tracks à la carte as the second season aired. And while I Told You I Was Freaky has some of the best individual tracks the Conchords have done—see “Carol Brown” and “Hurt Feelings”—not all of them function as well without the visuals. A trio of cheesy, synth-y dance tunes—“Sugalumps,” “Fashion Is Danger,” and “Too Many Dicks (On The Dancefloor)”—are hilarious in the context of the TV show, but sound too similar when taken in succession. Similarly, some tracks hew distractingly close to their source material: “You Don’t Have To Be A Prostitute” and “We’re Both In Love With A Sexy Lady” are straight-up spoofs of The Police’s “Roxanne” and the R. Kelly/Usher duet “Same Girl,” respectively, rather than the sort of loose genre parody the Conchords usually specialize in.

But while Freaky works better as a collection of moments than as a unified whole, those moments are still reliably funny, from the silly double entendre of “Demon Woman” to the conversational antagonism of “Rambling Through The Avenues Of Time.” It’s antithetical to quibble over issues of originality and cohesion when dealing with song parody, anyway; even when resting on their laurels, the Conchords have a singular ability to pen a damn funny song.