 There was a time when Stephin Merritt was being hailed as the next great American songwriter, compared not so much to the cream-of-the-crop of his indie-pop contemporaries, but to all-time greats like Berlin, Gershwin, and Sondheim. In large part, Merritt made that reputation as a result of the Magnetic Fields’ incomparable 69 Love Songs, on which he turned his musings on love and desire in all their forms—from queer to straight to indefinable, from romantic to platonic to unrequited—into the stuff of modern-day standards. Since then, however, it’s hard to say that Merritt has lived up to the lofty status that he had attained with 69 Love Songs, which, to be fair, would be a hard act for any artist to follow. Maybe Merritt spread himself a little too thin with projects like scoring the Lemony Snicket books and staging traditional Chinese operas for U.S. audiences or got a little too cutesy with more concept-minded Magnetic Fields albums, but the simplest explanation for why he hasn’t ascended the same heights again is that he probably just ran out of his best material, considering he used what, for most folks, is a career’s worth of songs on one album.
The aptly titled Obscurities is a nice reminder of what Merritt was like at the height of his powers from the mid- to late ‘90s, demonstrating he was already a prolific songwriter even before his ambitious masterpiece. So even though Obscurities consists of out-of-print singles, compilation tracks, and unreleased treats, its unearthed ephemera are representative examples of how Merritt can channel what’s a decidedly singular songwriting perspective into pieces that are sweet, sappy, and touching in an almost universal way. Opener “Forever and a Day”, most particularly, is a worthwhile entry in Merritt’s own version of The Great American Songbook, with its sparse, fragile ukulele and piano arrangement nicely embellishing Merritt’s wobbly baritone at its most tender. And considering Merritt has never shrunk from addressing social issues pertaining to sexual identity on his own terms in his own way, it’s hard not to want to read more into “Forever and a Day” as a prescient same-sex marriage theme, when he sings, “Our love is here to stay / Marry me / I’ll give you every color of the rainbow / They say it can’t be done, but what do they know?” It’s typical, though, that Merritt isn’t telling whether he’s saying what you think he might be, leaving the meaning ambiguous and letting it work on many levels all at once....full text |
Even if one isn’t familiar with much of the material that it collects, it’s hard to approach Merge’s compilation of Stephin Merritt’s Obscurities without having the sense of already having heard it. The album collects Merritt’s b-sides, compilation cuts, and a few unreleased tracks from the pre-69 Love Songs period -- in other words, the years he recorded for Merge. Luckily, this has in hindsight proved to be Merritt’s clear peak, so Obscurities gives us, at risk of being overly simplistic, the cast-offs from a pretty strong set of material.
Whether through the strength of the material or through sheer force of contrast with Merritt’s recent career low Realism, however, Obscurities manages to be an uncommonly enjoyable odds-and-ends collection. Even the songs that seem a bit haphazard, tossed off, or incomplete here are, unlike the material on Realism, rather endearingly spontaneous and playful. The lo-fi synth tracks, strongest among them The Cure tribute “Rats in the Garbage of the Western World” and the previously unreleased “Scream (Till You Make the Scene)” both display a deadpan silliness (sample lyric: “Write 12 simple songs with a beat / shriek words like a bitch in heat”) that he doesn’t seem to be able to pull off anymore. Stronger still are the three unreleased tracks from Merritt’s unfinished musical The Song From Venus, co-written by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). Opener “Forever and a Day” ranks with Merritt’s best love songs, while the sci-fi burbles of “The Song From Venus” (“Little green men are singing / of all the love they’re bringing”) and the buoyant “When You’re Young and in Love,” show Merritt at his most wide-eyed and childish....full text |
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