The Magnetic Fields
Realism
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Label: Nonesuch Records
Nobody will ever accuse Stephin Merritt of neglecting to wear his heart on his sleeve. For nearly 20 years, the unique singer-songwriter for the Magnetic Fields has unabashedly approached heartache and amore with a mixture of exaggerated bitterness, adolescent wonder and capricious, tongue-in-cheek humor. Although most bands that focus on the lonely topics of puppy love and broken hearts grow tiresome after a single record, the Magnetic Fields somehow continue to sound, even after all these years and all those lonesome Romeos later, as fresh and innovative as they ever have. Realism, the band’s third and final installment in its “no-synth trilogy,” finds Merritt and company venturing into the world of Judy Collins-inspired folk, delivering a record as solid and deceptively fun as anything the band has released since their classic, 69 Love Songs.
In many ways, Realism can be seen as the antithetic sister piece of 2008′s noise-pop, Jesus and Mary Chain-influenced Distortion; gone are the various means of, yes, distortion, that garbled, warped and defined that experimental record, replaced by a more organic and unspoiled blend of guitars (almost exclusively acoustic), strings and horns. Though Merritt has described it as a folk album, this modest summation doesn’t do Realism justice. Don’t let the self-imposed folk label fool you into expecting something akin to The Freewheelin’ Magnetic Fields; even without the benefit of synthesizers, electric guitars and lavish orchestrations, several songs (“You Must Be Out of Your Mind,” “I Don’t Know What to Say”) still give listeners that familiar floating-on-clouds sensation that we’ve come to expect from this band.
The sound may be a radical departure from Merritt’s recent efforts, but there’s still plenty of the familiar magnetism that’s always made this band so alluring: a liberal dose of Claudia Gonson’s mousy, girlish vocals to complement Merritt’s rumbling baritone; moments of despair (“Seduced and Abandoned”) and doom (“From a Sinking Boat”) alleviated by flashes of tenderness (“I Don’t Know What to Say”), childlike reverie (“The Dolls’ Tea Party”) and lighthearted playfulness (“We are Having a Hootenanny”); and a surplus of droll and unusual lyrics (“I want you crawling back to me/ Down on your knees, yeah/ Like an appendectomy/ Sans anesthesia“) that few other bands could ever get away with. Irony, sullenness and wry humor combine to create a record that somehow manages, like much of the Magnetic Fields catalog, to amuse and entertain even in its most ominous moments.
If Realism has a glaring weakness, it’s that at just over 35 minutes, it seems incomplete. Perhaps that’s to be expected, since Merritt originally intended to release Distortion and Realism as a double album; to get the full effect of the latter part of the “no-synth” trilogy and to appreciate the band’s diverse musical styles, listeners should approach the two records as a single, two-sided entity. Like Merritt’s and Gonson’s vocals, the striking differences in sound between the two albums both contrast and enhance each other. Accompanied by its foggy, distorted counterpart, Realism completes a truly remarkable effort, but the reality of this album is that even while standing alone, it’s a fine piece of folk-pop and one of the most enjoyable records so far this year.
by Marcus David
