In 2015, They Might Be Giants revived their Dial-A-Song service. Now, instead of calling the number on your phone and hearing a TMBG song on the other end, they were releasing a new song every week of the year and uploading it to their YouTube channel. It was an exciting time to be a They fan. I can sort of remember ‘Erase’ arriving in the first week of ’15. I tried to keep up with the releases as they came around, but I think I stopped about three weeks in when ‘Music Jail, Pt. 1 & 2’ popped up. Not because I didn’t like the song. I just had university stuff going on, and I didn’t have the mental room to take in new TMBG material. By the time that uni year finished, my second, there was so much music that I guess I thought it was too late to properly get into the schedule. ‘Unpronounceable’ was one of the tracks released during this time. I missed it. But I’d see that it was ranked highly on the This Might Be a Wiki Song Ratings list when I’d visit the website. It was considered to be a top-ten Giants song of all time for a brief moment. So I had to check what all the fuss was about.
The song has no introduction. John Linnell’s voice starts it all off with the band alongside him. With a spacey echo/delay effect applied to the vocal, he sets a scene where a narrator is speaking to someone that leaves them awestruck. So much so that time seemingly stands still in their presence. This enigmatic figure leaves, the narrator snaps back into reality. But they go on to realise that they’ve completely forgotten the name of the person they were talking to. Or at least heard it, but can’t seem to recall how to say it. A very universal situation. The person the narrator was fascinated by appears to be someone they liked or wanted to know a little better, and they’re left in a state of depression due to their inability to remember the person’s name. The narrator wishes they were able to relive and analyse the conversation via watching it through videotape, but know this is impossible. Even if they were able to, they’d be hypnotized by the figure’s face all over again. Someone out there had to write a song about forgetting a person’s name as soon as you’ve finished speaking to them. If anyone was going to do it, it had to be They Might Be Giants, especially John Linnell. He seems to be able to make a song out of the most commonplace circumstances, adding a little absurd twist in the process.
It may have been recency bias that the song was ranked so highly among TMBG fans near the time of its release. But it’s 11 years old now, and it still sounds just as great as it did in 2015. Think it has everything you want in a They song, which is a great melody and relatable subject matter with an unusual spin. I think the hidden genius behind ‘Unpronounceable’ is in its rhythm. It’s quite stop-starty, and the impact comes in the brief silences that occur throughout. They let the delay in Linnell’s vocals really fill the room in the verses. The rhythm’s also exhibited most prominently in the opening-closing gated track in the instrumental section, which was apparently a real focal area during production. John Flansburgh has a brief lead vocal moment too, which is nice. It’s always cool to hear both Johns on a track, even if it’s a case where it’s predominantly written by one of them. Yeah, not sure what else I could add here. Just another power-pop gem by the band, a genre that the band tend to lean into nowadays. I’m all for it. If you want to find ‘Unpronounceable’, it was released on Glean, the first of three albums released through 2015-16, made up of tracks that were released during the first four months of that Dial-A-Song revival. Not my favourite of the band’s, but good listening all the same.
