The Flight of the Conchords is a very funny show. The main characters, New Zealander friends Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, document their lives as a struggling folk rock group in New York City and all the situations they get themselves into. The show is supposed to parody their real-life comedy duo of the same name as they themselves came from New Zealand over to New York City after gaining notoriety for their catchy songs with funny lyrics.One would think that a comedy troupe whose main shtick was comedic song writing could come through with a hilarious album, which it did its first time around (2008's self-titled release Flight of the Conchords), but this attempt, titled I Told You I Was Freaky, is too much tied to its show to satisfy the casual listener.

The biggest issue with this album is that the lyrics seem to be directly correlated to the sights and visuals of their television show. It is difficult to separate this album from the second season of the television show, making it more of a soundtrack than a standalone album of original songs. This should have been somewhat expected due to its correlation with the show, but for example, when on the track "Friends," Bret goes on a minute-long talk about all the things friends can do for each other (on the already-short, 2-minute-long song) without a montage or certain background from the episode, it just becomes a cutesy basic song about, well, nothing.

On their first album, the songs sounded confident and creative, ranging in genres and themes. Many of the songs existed before the show was even conceived and were able to be worked out over many years of onstage comedy shows. Due to this fact, the songs worked both by themselves and within the plotlines of the show. This time around, the Conchords had HBO's time constraints of creating a full season of a television show in a timely manner and the difficulty working out comedic lyrical narratives to place on top of their catchy beats shows. The best example of this is the song "Petrov, Yelena and Me." The poor Russian accent of the singer mixed with an overly simple repetitive backbeat creates a song that would have been better off staying on TV, where it at least fit contextually. The first season was built around the songs, while in this effort the songs were built around the show. The result will be very pleasing to all the fans of the series and anyone else who has seen the specific episodes that the songs correlate to, as the goofy nature and awkward motions work very well for this comedy duo.

The album does not entirely fall victim to this problem, as there are some very redeeming songs that capture the magic of the original album, such as "We're Both in Love with a Sexy Lady," a song that parodies R. Kelly and Usher's song "Same Girl," and "Angels," a sweet song that compliments both singers' vocal talents and plays the album out nicely, among a few other well-done songs. Unfortunately my favorite song on this album, which was featured in the first season of the show but didn't make it on the first album, is only available as a bonus track on iTunes. The song, called "Pencils in the Wind," is a reminder of the duo's ability to create a track that has a nice message and vocal interjections that fit well on top of the simple acoustic music.

Overall, the album is not the best effort I could have imagined from these musicians. As a casual fan of the series, the semi-comedic lyrics and sometimes catchy but sometimes oversimplified beats didn't draw me in as much as I expected. But if you are a loyal follower, this album was made for you. These songs were originally all released the day after the episodes aired that featured them, which I feel gave them a much greater context and were therefore more enjoyable both to the casual fan catching last night's episode as well as the die-hard fan who follows them weekly. As evidenced by their first album, and other albums released by comedy groups like The Lonely Island, an album with high quality music and catchy funny lyrics is not impossible. Unfortunately this one, with its few good moments aside, didn't follow through as much as I had hoped.