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PHONING IT IN

Phoning It In: “It’s Good To Be Alive”

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.

Is this the first Dial-A-Song 2015 entry to feature the accordion? Maybe—I was only half-listening for it. The accordion practically defined They Might Be Giants in the early years. It was like them and Weird Al had cornered the market, and the association didn’t exactly help TMBG’s cause in the coolness category. (Something the Johns obviously don’t care about but, at some point, I did.)

Coming out of a deep freeze. “It’s Good To Be Alive” sounds effortless, doesn’t really feature all that much accordion in the foreground, and I might be underrating it at music criticism’s most wishy-washy threshold. The dreaded 7/10. Normally an artistic dead zone of begrudging respect and indecision, a borderline in search of a Mario Mendoza to name itself after. Not here: 5/10 is the expected mean score, and once the sample size gets big enough we’ll run some stats and re-calibrate if necessary because I sometimes read too much Grantland.

File-A-Song: 7/10