Song of the Day 11/18: King Luan, “There Are No Gnomes in Sweden”

I don’t watch much TV except for my exposure when my wife does — I call it eaveswatching, because I’m usually just listening while I’m doing something else — so until last night I had never seen Jimmy Fallon do a Tonight Show bit called the “Do Not Play List.”

The idea is simple enough: Viewers suggest terrible songs, and Fallon picks a few to play on the air. The humor, other than the absurd tunes themselves, comes from watching the reactions of QuestLove and the Roots. I know this because my wife was watching the show last night to see the actress who plays Princess Diana in “The Crown,” and she tuned in while this segment was on.

I missed the beginning, but the first two entries I heard were truly execrable — one a middle-aged, paunchy guy singing in a horrible, whispery falsetto, the other a slow jam by a smooth-jazz trumpeter named Rob Juice reciting poetry that includes lines like “I love you more than liverwurst. Bratwurst too.” Followed by, “You my wet nurse.” In fact, Mr. Juice used almost every word in the rhyming dictionary for the song he titled “My Thirst.”

The last tune Fallon played, though, was different. Just a couple of bars in you could tell this wasn’t some vanity project, and by the end of the first chorus — “There are no gnomes in Sweden, no reports that anybody down there has ever seen them” — it was an earworm. As in some Frank Zappa songs, the dadaist lyrics are paired with a serious groove. Even Jimmy Fallon, as he ended the segment, said that he actually dug this one.

I was looking for the full tune before Fallon’s bit was over, and easily found it — the band, named after a mythological Chinese bird, is from Australia, and appears to be obscure even by that continent’s standards. All the band’s members (they started with five, I think they’re down to two) use silly stage names, and they’re obviously obsessed with loss — another of their compositions is “No Vampires Remain in Romania.”

Clearly, “Gnomes,” first released in 2013 and re-released on an eponymous album last year, has struck a chord with listeners, because several people have posted it to YouTube. One can only hope that last night’s network TV exposure heightens their profile and prompts more great tunes like this one.

If you want to hear exactly how awful the other songs were, here’s the full Tonight Show clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGM18Otn5D0