(To Stream The Entire Album, Scroll Down To The Lala.com Player Below)Magnetic Fields, spear headed by Mr. Insecure himself - Stephin Merritt, is one of the most prolific bands to never receive attention outside of their own genre - and that was the plan all along. Since 1991 Merritt and company have been more than content to churn out music to their own liking and let the tunes speak for themselves. Perhaps the band is more famous for their prolificness as opposed to their deadpan approach to pop. Why else would you name an album 69 Love Songs if it didn't contain just that?
Realism is a companion album to 2008's Distortion. While the latter is a whirl wind of feedback as well as a melancholy experiment in garage fuzz, the former is the band's first foray in folk music sprinkled with Victorian chamber pop and hints of country twang here and there. You can't have one album without the other or else you loose the full intent behind Merritt's master plan - to make you feel as sad and isolated as him.
Magnetic Fields has rarely been about giving you the immediate luxury of melody. Merritt's voice is a lonesome bass that sounds like hollow cannon fire. His approach is to concoct impassive vocal lines blended with instruments that scream of sunshine and rainbows. Everyone else may be having a hootenanny but he's off in the corner sulking, and that's the whole marketing campaign for this band - singing about the end of the world with a smile on your face. Sure it may not be unique, but it's genuine enough to make these tunes believable.
Merritt displays his dismal disposition with a surprisingly wry smile from the get go on Realism. "You Must Be Out Of Your Mind" opens the album with an inner longing for revenge mixed with a happy go lucky feel. "Why would I want to talk to you? I want you crawling back to me down on your knees." All the the best lines on the album are delivered with little or no emotion. It's so tenderly vague that you can interpret his blank chimes for however you seem fit.
Not everything is for Debbie Downers (sort of). Songs sung by pianist, drummer and band manager Claudia Gonson are the pick me ups that keep Realism from being too much of a bummer - even if her tunes are all about the same themes as Merritt's (disenfranchisement, sadness, loneliness etc). But Gonson gives her performances more oomph which makes her tracks a bit more buoyant. "Interlude" proves my point.
Yet Magnetic Fields remain's Merritt's brain child. So it would only makes sense that the best material is reserved for himself. "I Don't Know What To Say", "Better Things" and album's best song "Walk A Lonely Road" are the sound of a master manic depressive aged 44 years sounding as hopelessly frail as a child on the playground with no one to call a friend. He knows how to pull heart strings, but does so without being blatantly calculated - (cough Green Day).
These songs are concise and compact. At 12 tracks and only 33 minutes, there isn't a grand statement to be found in each song, but if you take the time to add up the individual elements then Realism becomes something more tangible than your average musician wallowing in his own self hatred - it becomes a group therapy session.
Sure this record won't lift you out of your bad mood, and the fact that it's dependent on another album to achieve its goals doesn't help either, but when songs are this drearily catchy and modestly simple, you can't help but give it the benefit of the doubt for being what it is - blissfully crafted mopey pop. Smiles!
Grade: B
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