33 rebellions per minute
"I have a mandolin. I play it all night long. It makes me want to kill myself"
1994
Magnetic Fields, HOLIDAY
File under: multiple-counterpoint cheesy synth-pop, romantic depressive division; a near-neighbor of Frazier Chorus, Angel Corpus Christi, and more recently the Pulsars. It puzzles me that synthesizer music was hugely commercial in the early 1980's, when the technology was making its first leap towards accessible use, yet has become deeply obscure as the programming of sounds has become more varied and interesting. The cynical interpretation would be that most people don't want varied and interesting, which, after trying the Loud Family's DAYS FOR DAYS on random Iowa radio-listening friends this vacation, I think seems all too likely. Nonetheless, HOLIDAY is a clear descendant of the Human League/ Heaven 17/ Duran Duran style of hitmaking. Each of the melody lines, however thickly arranged in overlap, consists of one note at a time. The melodies are simple and catchy ones in 4/4 time that most audience members will be able to sing, albeit without Stephen Merritt's melancholic tenor croon (very like Robert Pollard's, of Guided By Voices). The keyboard patches, meanwhile, basically sound like nothing that has any real-life analogues: they sound like the shiniest moments of their artificial forbears, only a little more unique and, usually, a little fuller and more legato--- delayed attacks and oscillations and ripples, more than blips and doinks.
"In My Car", a genuinely creepy-sounding highlight, seems to pit several time signatures against each other; "Torn Green Velvet Eyes" pauses on three occasions for what sounds like a sputtering Wheel of Fortune wheel coming up to full speed; "Sad Little Moon" is led by cello and tuba; "All You Ever Do Is Walk Away"'s title line is sung a capella; and one patch on "Take Ecstasy With Me" prompted my Mom, who liked this record enough to try and persuade me I'd meant it as a present, did make her say "I'd hesitate to play this, it sounds too much like the cats are breaking something". But these are exceptions. The lustful "Desert Island", which uses "Louie, Louie" chords and a near-generic, bell-like five-note hook, is at least as close to the spirit of the music. "In My Car"'s vocal melody is as standard as the instrumentation is twisted, and the repeated chorus of "I'm taking a drive to somewhere inside/ where you never left me and I never cried" could've been chart fare circa 1957, in the heartbreak tradition of Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" and Del Shannon's "Runaway" (let's not mention here that Lymon and Shannon both commited suicide, ok?). But that's the really _good_ chart fare of the time, I think. And if the only eccentricity in "Strange Powers", other than the succession of strained low sung notes, is a series of romantic rhymes like "On a Ferris wheel, looking out on Coney Island/ under more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand" (and an unexplained quasi-rhymed digression on "Las Vegas where the electric bills are staggering/ the decor hog-wild, and the entertainment saccharine"), well, isn't that enough?
I already knew much about Magnetic Fields before I'd ever heard them: how Stephen Merritt was too embarrassed to sing his own lines for their first two, less rococo, albums (WAYWARD BUS and DISTANT PLASTIC TREES), and how in concert Merritt apparently looks panicked and miserable except, briefly, when one of his frequent glances at his drummer/ manager Claudia Gonson catches her smiling back at him. Apparently, to him, lines like "Living without you, I think that I would die/ living with you, I can't hold my head up high" are not random computerized rock-song generator outputs. Apparently the silly rhymes, and the corrosively spat-out endearment "baby" on "Take Ecstasy...", are in the Mark Eitzel category of desperate gallows humor. Some of them feel that way, too. But in practice, as this album plays, I enjoy large parts of it in more of a bounce-up-and-down sort of way, so I guess you can choose the interpretation that suits you best.
1999
Magnetic Fields, 69 LOVE SONGS
Less than three weeks before I wrote this review, my favorite music reviewer (other than myself) selected 69 LOVE SONGS as his album of the year, and I didn't even mention it in my year-end countdown, so before we get started I want to clear that up: I didn't mention 69 because I'd only heard one-third of it, once. And I'm not going to select it as album of the year now, because an "album" should cost less than $30. Of course, the three discs herein are sold separately, but you don't get the nice booklet with the Stephen Merritt interview that way. By themselves, the 23 songs on the synthpop-heavy volume 2, which end up sounding like a genuine leap-forward sequel to HOLIDAY, would probably rate, for me, among the greatest pure-pop (no convolutions, non-bizarre tunes, no blasts of withering noise) albums of all time, in the elite company of They Might Be Giants' FACTORY SHOWROOM and the Primitives' PURE, only gloomier. Then again, by the themselves, the songs on volume 2 wouldn't be a randomly ordered selection from a tossed-off 67-song survey of obsolete Western songwriting traditions (only "Absolutely Cuckoo" and "Zebra", alphabetic bookends, had their position secured). And then they'd be something different.
When I describe 69 as "tossed off", I should acknowledge that this is the first Magnetic Fields release in four years, so that if you figure that all Merritt released in the meantime was this, a couple of singles, an album by the 6ths, and an EP by the Gothic Archies, he's only really recording 22 songs, or 60 minutes, a year. Which, given the lack of filler, is fast enough to gape at. Then to envy, then to wish to imitate. Like TMBG's Linnell and Flansburgh, Merritt has mastered the art of writing winning melodies that if you or I sat down at a Casio and played around for long enough, we probably ought to have discovered for ourselves, which means that if I don't get my synthesizer back this bloody week, I'll need to nag Willow for it yet again, because I want to try. "Chicken With Its Head Cut Off", "I Need A New Heart", "A Pretty Girl Is Like…", "the One You Really Love", "Time Enough For Rocking When We're Old", "Papa Was A Rodeo", "I'm Sorry I Love You", and others I'm too lazy to catalog are simple country tunes, ones Merritt's deep, slightly gruff voice (Johnny Cash with some Leonard Cohen inflections) is built for. "Absolutely Cuckoo" manages to earn its title with a simple 7-note melody repeated over and over, simply changing key every repetition and using the wonders of multi-tracked vocals (essentially a four-Merritt quartet) to avoid breath pauses. "The Book Of Love", were it promoted heavily on Atlantic Records, would become a deservingly durable prom song and wedding song, but it's just a classic acoustic four-chord pattern, sustained only by its words and Merritt's slowest, most intense singing. "Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits", to pick one example of many, repeats an 8-note melodic phrase with barely a variation, getting away with it only because the song is short, and the synthesizer counterpoint has the depth to keep things interesting.
There are also a fair number of tunes with Broadway sophistication, from the a capella Rodgers & Hart homage "How Fucking Romantic" (paced by finger-snaps) to the lushly pianistic, rhythmically just barely off, "the Way You Say Goodnight" and "Busby Berkeley Dreams". And more than a few of the country tunes are layered with multiple synthetic countermelodies as formally correct as Bach's. And some are just voice and autoharp, or ukelele, while some songs are complexified by backing vocals that seem charmingly (and falsely, no doubt) confused where and when they should've started chipping in.
What all of the songs have in common is Merritt's awareness that they shouldn't have too much in common, because three hours of pop songs, or even one, is one hell of a lot. Close to a fourth of the songs are sung by nice-voiced people named L.D. Beghtol, Dudley Klute, Claudia Gonson, or Shirley Simms, not because they're as individually compelling as Merritt but because, after a while, it's just helpful that they're a break in the parade of Merritts. Around half the songs are traditional displays of Merritt's synthesizer collection, with which he shows an astonishing talent for either 1) generating thoroughly original voices or 2) making canny use of the weirder factory presets while seeming, nonetheless, to be lodged in a permanent 1983 cheezines - which he often revels in (check the ridiculous bass monotone on "Parades Go By", the playful succession of shiny-bright instrumental voices on the nonetheless intense "Long-Forgotten Fairytale", or the entire sound envelope of "Strange Eyes", for example). Other songs pit subdued synthesizer lines against lap-steel guitar, mandolin, autoharp, zither, cello, or any of five types of ukelele; and, as mentioned, some are entirely acoustic, and work better for the contrast. "I Shatter" lowers Merritt's low voice by an artificial octave, raises it to a loony near-falsetto, and plays them against each other over a minimalist swarm of angry cellos. "Punk Love" is a deranged minute-long kiddie cartoon. "Experimental Music Love" is a packed echo chamber of spoken syllables. "When My Boy Walks Down The Street" is a recreation of the "Be My Baby" era of technologically cramped toy symphonies. "Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget" is what folk songs might once have sounded like, as speculated by a clever 11-year-old under the chemical influence of too much chocolate. "Love Is Like Jazz" is, by most reckonings (not mine!), a mistake, but its shambling, disorganized, free=random conception of the genre, and Stephen's deranged attempt to meld beat-poetry with offensive crooning, are certainly a change from the surroundings. No song lasts long, and no style lasts for more than three songs in a row.
Lyrically, 69 is a bit more confusing. Merritt is really _good_ at writing romantic songs, and at singing them. "The book of love is long and boring/ no one can lift the damn thing/ it's full of charts and facts and figures/ and instructions for dancing./ But I - I-I-I -I -I/ love it when you read to me/ and you -ou -ou-ou -ou-ou/ you can read me anything", for example: how better to sound sincere than to completely deflate your own cynicism? "I built a ship with my own hands/ to take you to the moon/ I tok a pen in my own hand/ and wrote you a hundred tunes": with his deep yearning voice and his proven capacity to write songs in bunches, why should anyone doubt that? "Long-Forgotten Fairytale" (sung by Klute) agonizes over the temptation to re-enter an abandoned romance with fully convincing detail. "I Shatter"'s rejection fantasy is funhouse bizarre, but hits far harder than it ought to. "The Way You Say Goodnight"'s music, gorgeously subdued theater, is perfect for the pedestal romantic worship of the lyrics. The temptation to place five or six of these songs on the same mixtape (hey, there's 63 songs left to buy!) is, for me, defeated because I don't want the recipients worrying that I'm trying to say something non-musical.
A broader view might suggest, contrarily, that all the songs are a private inside joke, or perhaps a statistician's survey. Okay, we've got our crush songs, our marriage proposal, our denial of reality, our attack on infidelity, our overwrought "I Don't Believe In The Sun" rejection metaphor (with its last-minute wink line "astronomy will have to be revised"). We've got our cowboy-romance genre exercise, our elegant blues song, our twangy hyper-literalization of "love of God". We've got our song about the lover's eyes and a song about the lover's walk. We've got a song comparing love to jazz, and a song comparing love to a bottle of gin, and a song reducing an entire city to "where my baby waits for me", and a song dismissing everyone in the entire world except my baby and me as dross. We've got a song where the singer croons "there'll be time enough for sex and drugs in Heaven", and pauses the song two beats like a comedian waiting for laughter. Let's toss in a soldier's song to his girl back home, and maybe a song about a drunken first-meeting marriage agreement that only one partner cares to recall. Oh! And a love song to the singer's guitar, for its seductive powers ("acoustic guitar, if you think I play hard/ well you could have belonged to Steve Earle or Charo or GWAR").
But I think people reveal more in what they choose to joke about than they might intend to. Last night I was discussing cult religions with my friend Cortney, I said dozens of intendedly serious things, and none of them would tell an observing stranger nearly as much about my values as my tossed-off insistence that "I'm never going to form my own religion. Every time God talks to me, He says illogical things, and He always wants the last word. Besides, He keeps playing that damn Christina Aguilera CD, over and over". Similarly, Stephen Merritt awards himself 69 songs, and despite the album title's wink, there isn't a single take-off on the seduction songs of R. Kelly, or the 20-minute smooth-talkings of Barry White (a.k.a. "Chef" on South Park). I'm willing to bet the average reader of Maxim says "I love you" three times as often as the population generally, but none of Merritt's story songs involve clever pickups or new sexual stimulation methods. My friend Hailey, who's taking a class in romance writing, says everyone but her interpreted an opening story line involving "the feel of her skin" as a reason to start with a steamy sex scene; but I wouldn't have done that, and I don't think Merritt would've either. That's not where he starts; sex is greatly entertaining, and a useful scorecard for monitoring a relationship's status, but I'm almost certain he doesn't use the romance as a monitor for whether he'll get laid. He makes fun of idealization, and happiness, and compatibility, and crushes, and wounds. And I'm with him: I think those are the interesting bits too.
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