In the third installment of his Thing a Week series, Jonathan Coulton somewhat reduces the pathos and adds a bit to the eccentric nature of the lyrics, further cementing his geek pop credentials. Where previous albums carefully wrapped the human experience into well-crafted arrangements, this third installment spends a little more time simply having fun and exploring genres. The album opens with a thumping bit of pop that opens up some organ in combination with the guitars, and hails from the earlier days of Coulton's career as a singer/songwriter in cafes. "When You Go" shows off sheer choral music. There's straightforward bluegrass in "Just as Long as Me," and some fairly dark shoegaze in "Famous Blue Raincoat." While Coulton jumps from genre experiment to genre experiment, the fun pops out. A song devoted to Tom Cruise's existential crisis brings out a dose of the fun that characterizes Coulton's music to his fans. "Soft Rocked by Me" uses the sensitive soft rock ballad concept as a blatantly insensitive mating play ("You've never been soft rocked 'til you've been soft rocked by me"). The irony carries over to "Not About You," with a stalker-in-denial protagonist and a quick pop riff. Of course, the human experience is still present as in all of his collections, but it's been phased back primarily to unrequited love and dreams of grandeur. The hit "Code Monkey" combines thick power pop with a longing for the office secretary and a better life, and deserves highlighting both for the music and for the sentiment. The music is a little more playful on this installment than on previous ones, and replaces pathos with longing as an underlying theme. The songs might linger in the mind a little less than some of his other compositions, but "Code Monkey" alone puts this album firmly in line with the rest of the series as an excellent combination of music and sentiment.
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