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31 January 2008, 3:02 pm No Comments

Music: Review: The Magnetic Fields — Distortion

Queer indie synth-pop rocker Steven Merritt loves a good theme. His project The Magnetic Fields has a discography filled with theme albums. There’s the twangy travel album, Charm of the Highway Strip; the refreshing vacation album Holiday; the band’s magnum opus, 69 Love Songs, among others. And then there came “I”, their previous album, filled with songs that start with the letter “i”. Despite being a long-time “Mag Fields” fan, I freely admit that “I” was their weakest theme as well as their weakest album. So when I heard the band had another studio release, Distortion, I wasn’t very excited. And when a friend who rushed out and bought it reported to me that he HATED IT, I was even less jazzed. But when I finally got around to listening to it, I was pleasantly surprised. And after a few listens, I’m superjazzed.

Per the name/theme, Distortion’s tracks are heavy with fuzz. The album has a feeling very similar to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy: the tracks are blanketed with an electric snowfall of high-pitched screeches and buzzings, waves of tingly haze, with drum beats are reminiscent of something produced by Phil Spectre. Distortion sounds like the inner workings of a rusty old machine, whirring away noisily yet rhythmically.

The songs on Distortion cover material familiar to Mag Fields fans: sex, relationships, dreams, dancing, obsession, alcohol, bitterness, loneliness, desire. And as with many of the tracks on 69 Love Songs, several of Distortion’s tracks have female voices singing about female love interests, etc. And Merritt’s signature cleverness and irony are still intact throughout the album.

With an artist as prolific as Merritt, every song can’t be incredible. The major criticism of 69 Love Songs is that many of the tracks were “throw-away songs”, either woefully cheesy lyrics with sparse instrumentation or small, one-minute experiments that no one would consider a song. Personally, I felt that over half the tracks on “I” were throw-aways. However, Distortion is refreshingly free of such clutter. The closest to a throw-away would be the thirty-second intro to Too Drunk To Dream, which if not sung a capella would have been pretty clever:

Sober, life’s a prison
Shitfaced, it’s a blessing
Sober, nobody wants you
Shitfaced, they’re all undressing…

The band’s line up this time around includes Shirley Simms, who sang many of my favorite tracks on 69 Love Songs. And long-time band-mate Claudia Gonson, who usually shares the vocal spotlight with Merritt, focuses mostly on instrumentation on this album, providing some backing vocals but never taking the lead.

The Magnetic Fields have been producing queer-friendly and queer-themed pop music since 1991. I heard my first Magnetic Fields song, 100,000 Fireflies, in 1992 and have been charting the band’s course ever since. Charm of the Highway Strip, the soundtrack to the first year of my first long-term relationship, is filled with Merritt’s deep baritone voicing queer lyrics, for example: “You have become like other men, but let me kiss you once again…” Subsequent albums maintain queer or ambiguous themes. Merritt has stated in past interviews that his songs are universal, and that the gender of the singer of a given song is arbitrary, like a woman singing an ode to her guitar to bring her back her girl. Regardless of the intention (or lack there of) behind them, the same-gender love songs are an added bonus that make songs of The Magnetic Fields even more endearing.

After the woe that was “I”, I had nearly given up on The Magnetic Fields. Thankfully, their artistic course made a much-needed correction, and the’re back on track. A jangley, fuzzy, rich and clever one. Fans of “When My Boy Walks Down The Street”, “Grand Canyon” and “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” off of 69 Love Songs should be thrilled to discover 13 new tracks exploring the vein those songs first tapped into nearly 10 years ago.

The Magnetic Fields’ Distortion is available on iTunes. Tracks can be previewed on their MySpace Page.

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