The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt is always eager to prove there are infinite realms of love waiting to be revealed by pop music; that, if written well enough, love songs will never lose their power to touch us and tickle us and break our hearts in totally new ways.

As the title of Love At The Bottom Of The Sea implies, Merritt has set out this time to explore some of love’s murkier, slimier habitats.  In past songs, he’s stabbed lovers and fantasized about pushing them off cliffs, but now he’s a bit more twisted than that.  The narrator of “Your Girlfriend’s Face,” for example, hires a hitman to shoot her cheating man’s girlfriend in the face, and then that woman scorned is gonna bury the guy alive while he’s tweaking on crystal meth.  Another cuckquean in “My Husband’s Pied-a-Tierre” also wishes deadly revenge on her unfaithful man, only this time she’s singing from a loony bin after discovering her spouse’s “bachelor pad.”  As is often the case in Magnetic Fields songs, the results are much more charming on record than on paper: the delivery is always delightfully deadpan, and the melodies are a fine mix of familiar and novel.

Then there’s the synths.  The synths are a big deal here.  This is partly because synths were such a big deal for The Magnetic Fields early in their career, up through their utterly-essential masterpiece 69 Love Songs.  But 69 Love Songs was over 12 years ago, and the 3 very good albums the band released between then and now (i, Distortion, Realism) deliberately offered zero synths.  Now Love At The Bottom Of The Sea is all about synths, and playing with lots of cool new synth toys that have become available in the past 12+ years.  The “bottom of the sea” isn’t just a metaphor for the depths of love we’re navigating; it also describes all the whooshes and waves and blurps we’re scuba-diving within.

The fun that Merritt & company have jumping back in the synth pool is palpable and contagious.  It makes “Your Girlfriend’s Face” a death threat you can wiggle your butt to.  It makes religious-mandated abstinence sound as sexy as actual sex in “God Wants Us To Wait.”  All that synthesizing is such a diversion it can even distract from how much substance there is.  During the first listen or two, Love At The Bottom Of The Sea might seem more superficial than the typical Magnetic Fields album, without any songs as beautiful as past gems like, say, “The Book Of Love” or “It’s Only Time.”  However, more than a few songs reveal some serious poignancy after repeated listens.

“Andrew In Drag” initially comes off like an amusing farce, with its ladies’ man narrator falling madly for a cross-dresser.  But it becomes awfully heart-breaking the more you hear it and think about it.  This guy isn’t just falling for Andrew in drag, he’s practically ruined by Andrew in drag.  He’s unable to fall for any man or woman anymore.  And not only that- Andrew’s not even into drag. It was a one-time thing: “I’ll never see that girl again/ he did it as a gag.”  There’s no hope of our humble narrator ever fulfilling his burning desire.  This is some fucking Shakespearean tragedy right here.

In “The Only Boy In Town,” a woman could totally fall for the boy she’s singing to, if only it weren’t for every other boy alive striking her fancy.  In “Machine In Your Hand,” a guy wishes he could be the iPhone-like gizmo for a tech-obsessed crush (”I don’t know why I love you/ you’re not really a person/ more a gadget with meat stuck to it“).  The fact that both of these songs feel genuinely romantic is borderline miraculous, and a testament to Merritt’s genius.

Yet there a few tracks where Merritt’s genius takes a smoke break, and not even a boatload of cool synths can rescue them.  A particularly disappointing stretch follows the excellent opening sequence of “God Wants Us To Wait,” “Andrew In Drag,” and “Your Girlfriend’s Face.”  The sluggish “Born To Love” isn’t helped any by the generic hopeless romantic behind the microphone.  “I’d Go Anywhere With Hugh” doesn’t go anywhere beyond it’s blandly punny unrequited love triangle (”I love Hugh/ and Hugh loves you/ you love me/ and he does not/ I don’t love you/ you don’t love Hugh…“).  “Infatuation (With Your Gyration)” is barely more inventive than The Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.”  Fortunately, there aren’t any more stinkers until the last track, “All She Cares About Is Mariachi,” which seems to exist merely to rhyme “mariachi” with words like “hibachi” and “Liberace.”  (Though I must admit I giggled at the lyric “So go ahead and hire Saatchi & Saatchi/ to advertise the sausage in your pants.”)  Any of these tracks could have been redeemed by a great Stephin Merritt melody, but alas, their tunes are as half-assed as their premises.

One of the best things about Love At The Bottom Of The Sea, though, is its brevity- of 15 songs, only 3 go past 2 and a half minutes.  So the few weak tracks zip by relatively painlessly.  As for the many good-to-great tracks, they pack worlds of luster into their tiny spheres- just like little pearls.

Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields doesn’t write songs quite as much as he writes “Songs.”  Kind of like how Quentin Tarantino makes “Movies” and The Simpsons is a “Sitcom,” Stephin Merritt compositions rarely have just one level; practically every artistic choice he makes works as a wry comment on songs you’ve heard a thousand times before.

So anyone familiar with Merritt’s work will already know not to take the title of the new Magnetic Fields album literally.  It’s called Realism not because it lacks the irony, the extended metaphors and other self-aware artistic conceits that the band typically relishes.  If anything, the title of the almost-all-acoustic album may just be a swipe at pretentious folk musicians who think their style is any more “authentic” than the rest.  In fact, with its abundance of autoharps, toy pianos, campfire sing-alongs and studied medieval minstrelsy, Realism is one of the most frivolous and artificial Magnetic Fields records to date.

That’s not necessarily a criticism.  Realism certainly contains a fair share of moving “Songs” that reveal profound and heartbreaking truths about human nature, and in typical Merritt fashion, they do so in ways that remind us to take a step back and think about how fucking silly it all really is anyway.  (At one point, a jilted lover/new parent sings, “Seduced and abandoned, and baby makes two/ I think I might drink a few,” before stoically adding, “…and maybe the baby will too.”)

The album opens with “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind,” arguably its best and most accessible track.  It’s so good that at first, a casual Magnetic Fields fan might think the band’s ripping off one of their past hits.  But “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” clearly has its own great melodies and its own righteously catty attitude (”I want you crawling back to me/ down on your knees, yeah/ like an appendectomy/ sans anaesthesia”).  In 15 years, when the masses have finally (I hope) embraced Merritt as one of the most brilliant songwriters of his generation, “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” will surely be one of the songs sung by American Idol contestants on “Stephin Merritt Night.”  (Of course, Idol won’t stay on the air for the next 15 years; it’ll be cancelled after this season and resurrected as soon as nostalgia for the 2000s becomes marketable.)

The songs that follow don’t always pop as potently as the opener, but they all have their charms.  On “Interlude,” “Always Already Gone,” and “Painted Flower,” Merritt enlists the band’s most sincere singer, Shirley Simms, to add warmth and pathos to lyrics of haiku-like brevity (”I’m just a painted flower, a frozen bloom/ left alone in some forgotten room/ a fly in amber, I pose in my tomb”).  When the lyrics get too nasty or depressing, like on “I Don’t Know What To Say,” “Seduced And Abandoned” and “From A Sinking Boat,” Merritt tempers them with his own deadpan bass-baritone.

Some of the most delightful moments of Realism come when Merritt playfully lampoons the tight-assed Caucasians that make up much of his audience.  I always get a kick out of Claudia Gonson’s performance in “The Dolls’ Tea Party,” where she sings as a WASPy woman suffering from arrested development- or perhaps a precocious little girl who will soon grow into such a woman: “At the dolls’ tea par-tee, we twit-ter along/ we prat-tle and tat-tle on who’s done whom wrong.”  It’s not exactly a song I’d ever crave to hear on its own, (and it almost sounds like it might have been an outtake from Merritt’s ingenious score for the off-Broadway musical version of Coraline), but I smile every time it plays.

I feel the same way about the songs where whole gang sings together, as they do in “We Are Having A Hootenanny,” “Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree,” and “The Dada Polka.”  These tracks are the most “Song”-like on the album- note the way that “Hootenanny” tries to sound like the lamest, least rambunctious hoe-down in history, and how the singers deliberately over-enunciate their zzzzzzzees.  As a result, their replay values aren’t quite as high as the other tracks on Realism- but they make listening to the entire album a hell of a lot more “Fun.”