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PHONING IT IN

Phoning It In: “No Cops”

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, “No Cops,” is not sung by John Flansburgh or John Linnell. “No Cops” is sung by a person who goes by the name Corn Mo. Please excuse me while I wash my hands and disinfect my keyboard after having to type the disgusting, disagreeable combination of words that is “Corn Mo.”

The aforementioned vocalist is kind of like They Might Be Giants’ own version of the Magnetic Fields’ LD Beghtol. And “No Cops” is similar to “Theme From Flood”—self-referential and probably best placed at the beginning of an ostensible year-in-the-making 52-track album. (Notably, that’s still 17 tracks shy of the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs.) The song therefore has a purpose in the context of a Dial-A-Song playlist. Its central conceit—that the audience is about to be trapped in the concert venue with  a sinister TMBG—is just dark enough to put this over the .500 mark.

File-A-Song: 6/10