(see the published version)
You get the feeling that Stephin Merritt, the singer-songwriter frontman of New York’s The Magnetic Fields, has got artistic sensibilities. Rather than jumping on the grunge/stadium rock bandwagons in the early 90’s, Merritt instead preempted his peers by a good decade by embracing the dreadfully unfashionable sounds of Kraftwerk and Joy Division. In 1999, just when the world was beginning to embrace the mp3 and music journo hacks were predicting the death of the album, Merritt released The Magnetic Fields’ ridiculously overwrought on paper but brilliant in practice triple-CD 69 Love Songs. Merritt’s a pop musician who can’t help but buck conventional pop wisdom, and for those of us who are serious about guitar and lyrics, this has been a good thing for a good while.
Distortion continues The Magnetic Fields’ love-affair with the unfashionable, drawing on 1960’s surf pop and drenching the music in the noun of the title. In case you’re unfamiliar with Merritt’s penchant for concept albums, be aware that Distortion isn’t just a clever name: the music sounds like it’s being seeped through the factory speakers of a 1987 Mazda 121 on a windy day. There’s something old-world or slow-food about this: you don’t need a good sound system to appreciate the intricacies of Distortion, but there’s not much that’s ‘immediate’ about it. In other words, it pays to invest time in the record, because like the music of The Beach Boys (whose influence clearly hangs over Distortion), what sounds merely like fuzzy pop on first listen turns out to be much more.
Which isn’t to say that Distortion is stuck in 1966. Merritt’s lyrics are too funny and there’s too much zombie flick or Grinch-who-stole-Xmas about the album for that. Almost every song on Distortion contains a LOL lyric, with a few ROFLOL thrown in for good measure. To take just one case, in “The Nun’s Litany” Merritt dons the habit and fantasises about alternative careers that our bored heroine might have pursued, each more decadent than the last. If you’ve never pictured a nun as a topless waitress, here’s your chance.
There’s other light moments on Distortion. The punchdrunk lovesick singalong of “Too Drunk to Dream” is the best karaoke song that probably (and tragically) won’t be coming to your local hit studio, and “California Girls” brilliantly reverses the premise of its namesake, with Merritt repeating “I hate California girls” over the promise that said girls will taste the wrath from his battle ax, all sung through a surging wave of guitar.
But it’s the dark, profound, surprising moments on Distortion that make this more than a good album. The aforementioned zombie flick sounds pop up everywhere, best exemplified in that squealing, screaming, distorted second guitar which rarely goes away. And then there’s Merritt’s much lauded turn of lyrical phrase, as adept at penning the ratfink dialogue of an abusive Spaniard (in “Xavier Says”) as he is at producing a stunning final stanza to a song that first appears nothing more than a schoolyard toss (in “The Nun’s Litany”). Just keep the lyric-book nearby.
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