Distortion (first thoughts)

[These are my thoughts after listening to Distortion, the new Magnetic Fields record, about seven or eight times in the last six hours or so.]

I bought my copy of the Magnetic Fields’ Distortion album yesterday but patiently waited until I left work to play it. If it was going to be the barrage of feedback that I’d heard it would be, I didn’t want my first listen to be on shitty computer speakers. Which is one of the reasons I didn’t get an advance listen on Myspace. A new Magnetic Fields album deserves better than streaming audio that’s probably going to hiccup every twenty seconds. I’d already sneaked listens of Three-way and Too Drunk To Dream when Stereogum leaked them, but I wanted to really listen the first time I played the album.

Call me a nerdy Stephin Merritt fanboy. I don’t care. It’s true.

So I left work last night, and Princess Onions* and I drove around Johnston and North Providence and Smithfield, some of the more quaint, New Englandy, To Die For-esque mafia suburbs of Rhode Island, and the CD didn’t disappoint. As I swooshed past snowy lawns and old-timey A&W Restaurants, Stephin Merritt and Shirley Simms took turns singing over drony feedback and, despite typically arch lyrics, I think this might be the MF’s warmest record yet.

Lyrically, the record is much as you’d expect. Witty, strange, a smidge pretentious. After releasing about an album a year under assorted names over the past fifteen years or so, Merritt’s songwriting still doesn’t extend much farther than the same topics he’s been singing about forever–love, dancing, the undead, and sometimes driving. When 69 Love Songs came out over eight (!) years ago, the lyrics seemed like the best part of the songs. Because who else rhymed “so sure” with “Holland-Dozier-Holland”? Or wrote anything as beautifully ridiculous as The Night You Can’t Remember? Or Xylophone Track?

The follow-up album, 2004’s i, disappointed me because the lack of synths seemed more spiteful than anything. I’m all for changing styles, but songs like I Thought You Were My Boyfriend (my favorite on the album) sounded like they were played with all the wrong instruments just to be stubborn.

That’s not a problem with Distortion. Although Merritt’s credit in the liner notes still says “NO SYNTHS,” this time the songs don’t suffer for it. And the fact that the vocals get buried under layers of swirling noise makes the poppy melodies all the more impressive. Three-way, the opening track, doesn’t even have lyrics other than the title. With a surf guitar reminiscent of Last Splash-era Breeders, it’s a great introduction to the album because it places emphasis on the production over the lyrics.

Drive On Driver, the one I’ve played ten times already in the eight waking hours since I bought the album, features Shirley Simms singing about a wealthy old man and the girl who jilted him. (For some reason I’m pretty sure the character in the song looks like Fred Flintstone’s Uncle Tex.) But the best thing about the song is the vocal melody.

Another highlight is The Nun’s Litany, where Simms sings about being a cobra dancer and “a playboy’s bunny” over a childlike melody. I also really like Please Stop Dancing, the album’s only duet.**

Not every song is immediately engrossing–I haven’t had time to fully absorb Courtesans, Mr Mistletoe, or the carnivalesque Till The Bitter End, and I had time yet to really wonder why Stephin Merritt likes it when women sound a little bit like Japanese robots, as Simms does on California Girls and all kinds of ladies did on the 6ths’ Wasps Nests. But none of the songs on Distortion immediately stick out as bad, or boring. Some might just take longer to warm up to than others.

My only complaint, really, is the disc’s artwork. While I like the cover image, I hate the way the lyrics look, and the inspiration for the CD image itself is, well, strange and not so good.

(PS–Zombie Boy reminds me a lot of a song from the early eighties that I’ve spent all morning trying to place, to no avail. A woman sings it, and it’s sort of frosty and might sound like a cross between Laura Branigan and Modern Talking, sort of militaryish in a flashy and badly dated way. It’s a very drummy song and I think I mostly know it from people singing it at karaoke. Ideas, anybody?)

* My truck.

**Well, aside from Three-way, I guess.

Listen!
The Magnetic Fields, Drive On, Driver

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