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.
No, I’m the coward. It’s me. Hiding behind this Chinese wall of WordPress and making some of the weirdest judgments since the Oklahoma City Thunder traded James Harden. “I’m A Coward” isn’t flashy and it’s struggling to be midtempo, but not every TMBG song can bottle the energy of “Don’t Let’s Start” and “Erase,” and there is such a thing as pacing and my soft spot for self-deprecating lyrics. So this week’s entry gets to go above the .500 mark.
In this month’s print issue of MAGNET, which just arrived in my mailbox this week, A.D. Amorosi delivers a fascinating history of the making of TMBG’s breakout album Flood. Two things that made a particular impression after reading it: First, Amorosi points out Linnell’s feel for the unreliable narrator in his lyrics. I tried, less successfully, to get at that point in an early post in this series. Second, producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley went directly from Morrissey’s Bona Drag to Flood. I undoubtedly listened to those two cassettes back-to-back and never got the connection.
File-A-Song: 6/10
