Recommended Album: The Very Last Songs I Will Ever Record (Part 1)

On Monday, Mike Phirman (half of the comic duo, Hard 'n Phirm) released his first solo effort, The Very Last Songs I Will Ever Record (Part 1), a 32-minute collection of musical comedy, with just a few skits sprinkled inbetween. Phirman has the album available on his site, with no minimum payment required, however, Chris Hardwick (the other half of Hard 'n Phirm, House of 1,000 Corpses, Web Soup, etc.) noted on his blog that "all of the proceeds go to the 'Mike Phirman’s Wife Just Had a Baby' Fund."

With last year's release of The Lonely Island's Incredibad, it almost seems strange that an album like Phirman's can still exist and be funny without the assistance of T-Pain or Justin Timberlake. However, that's likely its greatest appeal. While "Weird Al" Yankovic does provide guest vocals on the track Street Meat (You Keep Tauntin' Me), it is Phirman alone who drives the weird here. A song like One for Them & One for Me evokes the sort of absurdist humor one might hear on the Dr. Demento Show or a Firesign Theater album, rather than some rerun of VH1's "100 Most Dateable Guys in Comedy."

The track, Lollytown begins with a crowd booing a concert promoter who is announcing that the show's headliner, Rage Against the Machine, is unable to make it due to a scheduling conflict. However, a replacement band, Lollytown, is going to perform instead, the joke being that Lollytown sounds (perhaps unintentionally) almost exactly like Kimya Dawson, with lyrics like "I ride unicorns and I like candy // I go to the beach and I get sandy..." It's a funny concept, executed very well, and it exemplifies Phirman's ability to combine the strangeness of a character with the reality of the listener to make a Liam Lynch-esque world of the realistically bizarre.

This is again seen in Sketchy Dudes, where the narrator switches and each repeatedly breaks the fourth wall while describing these odd men that one might pass and consider the likelihood of their being a murderer, or at least some sort of deviant. As the song goes on into different "acts," a whodunit forms, ultimately culminating in a twist ending worthy of M. Night Shyamalan (you know, if he made comedy records instead of movies about scrunts and killer trees). At any rate, it's a neat song that starts off sounding like something from an Eels album, goes into a bit where it sounds like something from 808s & Heartbreak, then ends up sounding like She's So Hot... Boom! by Flight of the Conchords.

The album closer, Indie, pokes fun at... well, you get it. With different, less self-deprecating lyrics, it could potentially be a fine example of the songs that it is mocking, but nonetheless, it is a fitting end, and it shows how truly talented a musician and mimic Phirman is. As I wrote before, this album does not fall into the same classification as efforts put forth by The Lonely Island or Whitest Kids U Know, but it belongs in a more timeless category, with the likes of Tom Lehrer, Yogi Yorgesson and, yes, Weird Al. It may not be well-received by white males between the ages of 14 and 21, but those who get it will love it. Anyway, try watching Chicken Monkey Duck without singing it for days afterward.