Distortion
The title’s no joke: *Distortion* sounds like music made in a foundry, each track prickly with feedback and fuzz, echo and drone. Stephin Merritt has even feedbacked the piano as well as the accordion and cello, and the resulting mix of orchestral pop and post-punk cacophony is both catchy and hard to listen to, like something that might once have been filed under “ambient headache” at the record store. Who else would — could? — think of a love song like “Zombie Boy,” which makes re-animating a corpse sound like a viable dating option? “You look pretty pure / For so long in the ground / You smell like a sewer / But you don’t make a sound.” On an album full of wintry, love-lost sorts of songs, the first track serves as a red herring: “3-Way” is a bouncy instrumental powered by carnivalesque piano and 60s garage-surf guitar, punctuated only by the joyfully chanted title. Visions of polyamorous decadence quickly vanish with the sour stick of bubblegum that is “California Girls” (the singer hates them), not to mention the world’s most cheerless Christmas song, the shriekily feedbacked and hungover-sounding “Mr. Mistletoe.” Merritt loves his schtick, and this album’s no exception. But by making his theme sonic, not literary (as it was in 1999’s acclaimed *69 Love Songs* or 2004’s soft-rock-y *I*), he’s stumbled on a curious truth: dissonance is to melody as loss is to love. Mixed together, they make beauty of the most unearthly kind.
With all of Stephin Merritt's cleverness and theatricality, it's easy to forget that the Magnetic Fields started out as an indie pop band.
It's a crime that one of the greatest Christmas songs in recent memory is being released in January. "Mr. Mistletoe," the fifth track on The Magnetic Fields' new full-length, Distortion, is mastermind Stephin Merritt's addition to the loveless-on-Yuletide canon, and it waltzes through washes of frosty fizz and curdled…
Stephin Merritt – mainman of New York’s premier industro chamber pop combo The Magnetic Fields – has only a moderately brilliant coat and a distinctly unsimian gait, but in all other respects he’s the photofit ‘musical genius’.
Discover Distortion by The Magnetic Fields released in 2008. Find album reviews, track lists, credits, awards and more at AllMusic.