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.
Kendrick Lamar stinks and you know it. That’s the sum total of Phoning It In’s coverage of the Best Albums of 2015, because we live in an insular world of Dial-A-Song. I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in Dial-A-Song, etc. Music critics are spineless and scared of being behind the curve. When you operate from that position of constant fear, there is no bandwagon you can jump on quickly enough. The technology sector operates the same way. Other sectors I am not sure about: medicine, for example—they probably vet things pretty well. There is no justice when Grantland and Wondering Sound retire from the internet, but Phoning It In survives, at least for one more week. Then we dismantle the one bandwagon we’ve been riding all year long (this one), and we walk in the road with the rest of you poor people.
This week’s song, “I Love You For Pyschological Reasons,” is in the top five of the year. This clever and animated pop song would have made sense as the final entry: a bookmark to the also-excellent inaugural track “Erase.” Now this becomes an exercise in figuring out what the finale will be, because we force logic onto Dial-A-Song. Could it be a compositional reflection on some or all of the previous 51 tracks? A short goodbye or a political statement? A New Year’s jingle? A dial tone? Stay tuned.
File-A-Song: 9/10
