Send "The Magnetic Fields " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 The title of the Magnetic Fields’ ninth album, Realism, is of course a trap. As a songwriter, singer, and musician, Stephin Merritt has never pretended to deliver Truth in song. Certainly you can listen to his songs the way most people naturally listen to music: react to the sentiment of the lyrics and ‘feel’ the song. But the song is always asking you questions too. The song may be crying with you, but it may be laughing at you too. Realism is a reminder that pop music is about perceived meaning, about using song-forms as vessels of perception. One rather beautiful song is titled “I Don’t Know What to Say”. On the one hand it’s an expression of the muteness we experience in the face of love. On the other, it’s a catalogue of the typical things a songwriter might say in a song about love. Merritt sings, in typically wry fashion, “I could say I want you / that would be a bore / maybe in a font you haven’t seen before.” Is the meaning in songs all about appearances, then, a matter of changing the font? The song fades out with Merritt still itemizing, indicating the way pop songs, and the exercise of trying to find the right words (window dressing), continue for eternity, an infinity of ciphers. Merritt is an expert at writing songs that work in a timeless pop-song way while simultaneously drawing attention to the form itself, even highlighting the slipperiness of the song as a means of communication. Realism contains a few exquisite ‘sad songs’, about departure and connection, that also comment on the nature of such songs: “Walk a Lonely Road”, “Always Already Gone”, “You Must Be Out of Your Mind”. “Always Already Gone” takes the popular-song notion of being ‘already gone’ (see Wikipedia entires on songs by the Eagles, Sugarland, Kelly Clarkson, Melanie C, and Powderfinger) both metaphorically and literally. In the process, it is the making of life into a dream and a dream into life, the unwriting of a story. Shirley Simms sings, “you leave me with only a story to tell / but at the beginning our story is done / because you were always / always already gone.”...full text |
| Guardian |
| The drawback to making the Album of Your Life is the problem of what to do with your life afterwards. Admittedly, it's a problem most rock and pop artists would love to face, as opposed to the more common dilemma of having made an album so catastrophic that your career options now consist of (a) appearing on a reality show where Gillian McKeith angrily protests the quality of your stools, alongside Lembit Opik, Wincey Willis and one of Goldie Lookin' Chain and (b) manning the tills at Halfords – but it's a problem nonetheless. Once you've made the album that everyone agrees captures you at the absolute zenith of your powers, once you've basked in the critical plaudits, public glory and sudden increase in the number and quality of people who want to hump you into the middle of next week, there is, as Phillip Larkin once noted of the Beatles' career trajectory, "nowhere to go but down". Buy it from Buy the CD The Magnetic Fields Realism Nonesuch 2010 Over the last decade, it's a problem that Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt has faced, admittedly on perhaps a slightly smaller scale than Lennon and McCartney did after adding the final apocalyptic orchestral crescendo to A Day in the Life, but nevertheless with damaging consequences. Their 1999 album 69 Love Songs may not have been the most musically groundbreaking in recent memory – although its melange of low-rent electronica, Broadwayish ballads, old-fashioned indie and ukelele doesn't sound like anything else – but it may be the most sustained example of bravura songwriting: three hours during which the quality hardly drops below stunning. Stuffed with songs so effortlessly beautiful they sounded like latterday entries into the Great American Songbook, and lyrics finely wrought and acidly funny enough to have impressed Cole Porter, it displayed everything Merritt could do to gobsmacking effect. It should have catapulted the Magnetic Fields to stardom. You can't escape the feeling that if Merritt looked and gave interview quotes like the similarly minded Rufus Wainwright, he might have attained an equivalent ubiquity. But he doesn't: he looks like an academic from a minor university who's just been informed that his department's funding has been slashed, while his interview technique involves the perennially winning tactic of being as difficult and diffident as possible....full text |
| Bbc |
| The Magnetic Fields’ 2008 album, Distortion, was a wilful, pugnacious hymn to its own title, revelling gleefully in its lack of resemblance to any previous Magnetic Fields album. Stephin Merritt’s characteristically crisp lyrical sketches were suddenly shrouded in squalls of Jesus & Mary Chain-ish effects, and the passing listener could have been forgiven for wondering whether he had finally abandoned the erudite indictments of Cupid that have characterised his career in favour of anguished, primal wailing. Any and all such concerns are assuaged by the opening track of Realism, The Magnetic Fields’ ninth album. You Must Be Out of Your Mind is absolutely prime Merritt – an arrangement of strings and banjo at once sumptuous and lo-fi, an ambitious and instantly beguiling melody, and a typically waspish lyric that confirms Merritt’s stature as the most inventive rhymer in the American lineage since Tom Lehrer: “I want you crawling back to me / Down on your knees, yeah,” he admonishes, “Like an appendectomy / sans anaesthesia”. Realism was apparently conceived as a companion volume to Distortion – original working titles were True and False – and there would have been a certain logic to that arrangement: Realism finds The Magnetic Fields returning to previously established patterns and parameters (within their canon, Realism is most closely related to 1999’s mordant epic 69 Love Songs). This is, of course, absolutely no problem. Merritt’s songs are, as ever, as lugubrious yet playful as his voice. On Seduced And Abandoned he imagines himself pregnant and jilted at the altar (“I did nothing but cry / In my one-ply / Negligee”); deadpan carol Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree is as sarcastic as might be imagined; and We Are Having a Hootenanny appears to be a square-dance called by a Scientology spruiker (“Come and take our personality quiz,” entices the second verse)....full text |
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