A few days ago I praised The Lonely Island’s new album Turtleneck & Chain. Though I assumed I’d already heard most of the best songs via their videos I still was curious enough to pull it down on iTunes. Unfortunately iTunes decided to freeze up, so I checked out Amazon Cloud. I was surprised at the painlessness of the 5 minutes required to purchase the MP3s and then download them to my phone (via the Amazon MP3 Android app). I’m going to check out if this would be a better option for my podcast subscriptions.

As I’d guessed most of the best songs were turned into music videos. There are also tracks which are vaguely familiar because they mix & match elements of raps which you’re already familiar with. So the album isn’t a total replicate than of what you can find on the internet already. Even tracks which are familiar are not exact copies.

One thing I have to observe is that there is a strong geek as opposed to nerd sensibility in The Lonely Island. Only a geek would reference a sexual encounter between Atreyu and Falcor! Turtleneck & Chain lacks the dense thickness of nerdcore to be sure, but I don’t think anyone could have expected that. Imagine the 12 year old Aaron Carter gone dirty and geeky.

Probably the funniest song which wasn’t turned into a video was “No Homo.” Let’s just say that I think it would be impossible to really make a video that could pass any rating system for what’s being described by the middle of the song, unless you go Team America and rely on puppets.

There’s a reason that The Lonely Island guys are blowing up all over the media. I never thought I’d put up a video where Michael Bolton is featured…but they make it watchable and entertaining!

(note, this is the uncensored version)