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.”