The session drummer, Alex Decarville, gives us eight flat beats per line on a snare and sixteen beats per line on a hi-hat. Darnielle chops his guitar to the snare’s rhythm but sometimes downstrokes sixteenth notes, along with the hi-hat, at the ends of the lines. Bruno’s low piano triads and Hughes’s up-in-the-mix bass line share a slightly syncopated three-stress rhythm:
"one of the best things that has ever happened in a song" You can say that again.