Which is entirely the point. Early vaudevillians weren’t all that concerned with utilizing lightning-fast diminished scales, electronic wizardry or Beat poetry to blow your puny little minds; they were there to entertain, pure and simple, to create an irreverent diversion from the more pressing issues of the day. I mean, really…what else would you expect from a guy dressed as a carnival barker with more loops in his moustache than a Keller Williams performance?

There’s a point at which parody, tribute and originality converge, and TMGB hit that sweet spot with both pinpoint accuracy and reckless abandon. Most of the album is laugh-out-loud funny (“William Howard Taft/had a great big belly and great big thighs/that slapped together when he walked by”) whether you know your early 20^th century American history or not, and balances the band’s comically proper demeanor with just a touch of sideswipe innuendo; I’ll leave it up to you to decide if the title “When Your Lips Are Playing My Kazoo” involves more than one variety of humming. 

In its heyday, this type of thing was always pretty tongue-in-cheek, but the retrospective twist that Bean and Fundon bring to the mix adds an extra shade of camp to the group’s throwback authenticity. Cheeky and endlessly charming.