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PHONING IT IN

Phoning It In: “Erase”

TMBG

They Might Be Giants have resurrected their ingenious Dial-A-Song concept by streaming a new song each week of 2015 at www.dialasong.com. MAGNET’s Matthew Fritch reviews them all.

Let’s abort this whole thing and start reviewing movie trailers. Because that’s essentially what happened last week, with the critique of what now appears to be a teaser track in the 2015 Dial-A-Song campaign. It turns out “Got Getting Up So Down” and another short track, “I Wasn’t Listening,” were late-2014 appetizers for the real thing. So eliminate those two songs from the canon, and realize there may be 53 posts in this series. Welcome to Dial-A-Song’s terrifying new math.

Everything in “Erase” starts off staccato—the drums, guitars, John Linnell’s vocals—but the song has two other gears, both of which are extremely rewarding, chorus-y bits of vocal harmony. (Diversion for a future post: analysis of the two Johns’ vocal harmonies.) The subject matter of “Erase” reminds me of “They’ll Need A Crane” from 1988’s Lincoln: In relationships, especially toward the end, people do and say and think terrible things they regret forever. In both songs, the singer is addressing the other person in the relationship, and Linnell is great at writing self-aware bits of the conversation.

From “They’ll Need A Crane”:
“And there’s a restaurant we should check out where the other nightmare people like to go/I mean nice people, baby wait, I didn’t mean to say nightmare.”

From “Erase”:
“Think of this as solving problems that should never have occurred/Please don’t call it strangulation, that is such an ugly word.”

The bar has been set high. Should there be a rating system? Fine. 0-10, with 0 being terrible and 10 being “the best I think They Might Be Giants can get.” Because there are no external forces, only Dial-A-Song. “Erase” is a 9/10. And that is a blue swatch on a field of blue at this point. As such, all ratings are subject to adjustment and recalibration until Dec. 31, 2015.

It appears TMBG are posting a new song each Wednesday. These posts will appear on Wednesdays, too, reviewing the previous week’s song.