Categories
PHONING IT IN

Phoning It In: “Hate The Villanelle”

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.

This week’s song finds They Might Be Giants raging against restrictive poetic forms with synthesizers and a sense of dynamics that are reminiscent of Roxy Music. Now I’m loading one bullet into the chamber of a gun and contemplating the sequence of events that led to that last sentence, the degradation of human thought, the end of music criticism as an image of the Great Serpent eating itself, the self-pranking indignity in acknowledgment of such a thing, the rat’s errand not to escape the maze but to fill it with words, dying lonely, the terror when you peer into the endless, black gaping maw of Dial-A-Song.

One of the weaker songs so far. In an earlier post I asserted that I could tell the difference between John Flansburgh and John Linnell. It is not, in fact, so easy to distinguish their singing voices. This is one of my very favorite things to find on the internet (my other “very favorite” things include celebrity casserole recipes and grammar blogs). It’s a Rosetta Stone, in the form of a 1996 .txt file written by a student at the University of Minnesota. It’s perfect. This document being 19 years old, however, doesn’t have anything to tell us about “Hate The Villanelle.” I’m pretty sure it’s sung by Flansburgh.

The point of this digression is to determine whether I have a preference for the Linnell-sung tracks over the Flansburgh-sung ones, or vice versa. It’s inconclusive—while Linnell is the lead vocal on time-worn favorites (“Ana Ng,” “They’ll Need A Crane,” “Birdhouse In Your Soul”) as well as the excellent new “Erase,” there are clunkers in there, too. And Flansburgh sounds great on what’s arguably TMBG’s best-known song, “Boss Of Me.” Tell you what—at the end of this thing, in December 2015, I will produce a .txt file in the exact style of the University of Minnesota document, detailing the “who sings what” for Dial-A-Song 2015.

File-A-Song: 3/10