The Magnetic Fields – Distortion

The Magnetic Fields – “Too Drunk to Dream”

The Magnetic Fields – “The Nun’s Litany”

The Magnetic Fields – “Old Fools”

(from Distortion)

The trouble with releasing an album as monumentally encyclopedic and utterly perfect as 69 Love Songs is that there’s no precedent for following it up. In its own exhaustive way, 69 Love Songs was a complete statement, a fully realized summary of music in the 20th century, and it’s not easy to add to that accomplishment without the new items coming off as mere footnotes. So, for a time, Stephin Merritt deflected.

He indulged in a few new releases with his mid-‘80s pastiche techno pop group the Future Bible Heroes, co-written by Chris Ewen and Claudia Gonson. Together with accordionist Daniel Handler (alias Lemony Snicket), he released The Tragic Treasury, a cartoonish exercise in hyperbolic gloom and lugubrious excess that turned out to be the Gothic Archies’ best work to date. He wrote a few songs for the indie film Pieces of April before Katie Holmes was beamed up onto the Scientology space shuttle to salvation, and then there were the 26 lyrical vignettes from his Chinese opera work on Showtunes that didn’t manage to win over many new fans.

For fans still hungry for more of that all-encompassing buffet of musical styles and voices that Merritt served up on 69 Love Songs, the closest thing they had to whet their appetite was the 6th’s Hyacinths and Thistles (try saying that three times fast), released immediately afterward in 1999 and thereby solidifying Merritt’s reputation as an unstoppable songwriter. But for all its highlights, it still felt uneven. After a while, with all his idiosyncratic side projects building up and his dour irreverence for most pop music, you couldn’t help but wonder if these little excursions were expendable; just inside jokes he was pulling over on us in his sad hound dog way.

The important thing, it seemed, was to wait for a proper new Magnetic Fields album. And when i was finally released in 2004 it was a minor triumph, but still a little disappointing—an expected disappointment. But if you listened closely, there were signs the band was still developing. The use of all acoustic instruments was a bit of a shock for those familiar with the buzz and crackle of the cheap Casios and drum machines that typified the earlier albums. And the entire conceit of starting every song on the album with the titular letter “i” showed that the band was still willing to work within a focused creative environment, confined to a standard 40-minute timeframe.

But while my enjoyment of i was dampened by my expectations of what I thought the band should sound like and where I felt they fell short, in the process I learned to appreciate each of Stephin Merritt’s new releases on its own merits (no pun intended). Which is a good thing, because while the new Magnetic Fields album Distortion sounds nothing like any of the band’s previous output, it still manages to pull together all the elements I’ve come to love in their style. Underneath the screeching feedback and scratchy noise implied by the title, Distortion is loaded with classic, well-written tunes. Jangly, trebly arrangements are anchored by Merritt’s deep, robust baritone on half the tracks, while Shirley Simms was called in to re-record vocals on the other half. Comedic cabaret-style numbers are followed by dispassionate anti-love songs that seem more concerned with getting in a clever stabbing phrase than the emotions of the loners involved.

All the Jesus and Mary Chain references notwithstanding, what you need to understand that the distortion gag is just that—an artifice created for sales and entertainment. Distortion isn’t a product of 1980’s noise pop, or even a bridge back to that era. It can be overbearingly referential at times, but it’s distinctly personal. It doesn’t sound like Psychocandy-redux, instead it sounds like it was recreated purely off descriptions of the blistering white noise on Psychocandy, written by someone who had never heard the album but also happened to have a strong affinity for Irving Berlin.

My immediate reaction upon hearing this album was to prefer the songs sung by Shirley Simms. The tunes she handled were more instantly catchy and the lyrics had more of the memorable jokes that you don’t have to think about, like the bit about chopping down plastic-perfect California girls with a battle axe, or the pleasures of being a “porno starlet” and spending all day in bed. “I want to be a cobra dancer, with little Willie between my thighs,” she sings on “The Nun’s Litany,” “I may not find a cure for cancer, but I’ll meet plenty of single guys.”

But the more I listen to it, the more I realize how completely floored I am every time Stephin Merritt intones his deep, booming voice into the microphone. “Old Fools” is a stunning song, and it took me at least ten listens before I realized how powerful and central it is to the album. “Old fools dancing; old fools who believe they can dance and sing,” he sings, and adds, almost as an afterthought, “And fall in love / after all, love.” The way he adds that last “love” at the end there—as if it works as its own argument, as if love is such a preposterously intangible concept that it should be obvious to all involved that it’s not really there—it just kills me. It unplugs the stopgap in my heart and stands by to watch as the whole thing deflates. The song is a slow-burning dirge, and the distortion is used to wonderful effect, setting up towering walls of sound to protect the narrator in his desolation.

In one way or another, though, all the sadness of these songs are shrouded by something, be it cynicism, comedic hyperbole, or amplified distortion. “Too Drunk to Dream” laments the singer’s inability to get intoxicated enough to forget about his heartbreak, and “Please Stop Dancing,” the only duet on the album, picks up on the theme of forced forgetfulness with a dirty ‘60s beat. The lonely-hearted on “Courtesans” have their money to keep them company and a gentle, wintry frosting of guitar tremolo. “Mr. Mistletoe” overacts the sad bastard role, but still isn’t exaggerated enough to fit onto a Gothic Archies track, while “Zombie Boy” is a good reminder that Merritt’s tales of the undead are better left to his side projects. “Drive On, Driver” has a great country twang to it, and is probably what Charm of the Highway Strip would’ve sounded like if it was made with a female vocalist and a fuzz box.

While the distortion of the album’s title is ostensibly about all the noisy guitars you hear, it’s also about the misrepresentations we use to hide and disguise our emotions. Distortion may not be the best Magnetic Fields album by any means, but it’s a refreshingly concise and original body of work from one of the cleverest songwriters of our day.

-Posted by Todd