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PHONING IT IN

Phoning It In: “Sold My Mind To The Kremlin”

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.

“Sold My Mind To The Kremlin” is the most 1980s of all Dial-A-Song entries. I’m pretty sure it can’t get more referential to that decade than this. Parse the lyrics, and it reads like a David Lynch treatment of Rocky IV—in which Stallone becomes disillusioned by American pop culture after the death of Apollo Creed and becomes a KGB operative on a murky, mind-controlled mission at the height of the Cold War. Bonkers scenarios aside, there is not much to recommend this song. It isn’t the Magnetic Fields-style ’80s bedroom synth of “All The Lazy Boyfriends,” and it isn’t the Cars-like ’80s guitar gloss of “Unpronounceable.” Instead, “Kremlin” is overly robotic. Look, I found a video of Dolph Lundgren dancing and singing.

File-A-Song: 3/10