A few years ago here I said that The Magnetic Fields were the best band in the world, they quoted me on their website and both parties were highly gratified. Once you have 69 Love Songs and a back catalogue of such quality, breadth and depth you've set yourself a high standard - is the problem. The way to calculate the index of this is to make a list of an artist's Top 30 and see what number 30's like. Stephin Merritt's is in the same class as Motown, The Beatles and Burt Bacharach.Similarly, for how long is one expected to keep it up (which sounds like a Merritt lyric these days). David Bowie never recovered from the long sequence of masterpieces from The Man Who Sold the World to, say, Heroes. R.E.M. mercifully packed up after a bad last album, or two. Not everybody is prepared to admit what is obvious, that the Beatles weren't as good after 1966. Everybody finds the bottom of their talent in due course (and having just played 28 Merritt songs, it's difficult not to pour out these cheap double entendres). Quickies, you see. Meaning both short songs and brief sexual encounters.
There are 28 tracks because the longest is 2.35 and some are less than a minute. These are doodles scribbled in bars and little sign of having been worked on, crafted and given the grandeur of Papa Was a Rodeo, All My Little Words or The Book of Love. Perhaps it only reflects a decline into the celebration of cheap sleaze in Stephin but he's lost the glorious glamour of romantic love, however much he used to balance it off with an equal amount of irony. These songs are either a hollow pastiche of what he once did or he's chosen the wrong half of his recipe to keep. It's probably just lazy.
It becomes increasingly difficult to find a song to like once one has become accustomed to the parade of half-hearted cynicism and there are lines to like and songs that might have been worthy as minor tracks on the albums from the glory years. I noted When She Plays the Toy Piano which was then surpassed by Let's Get Drunk Again (And Get Divorced) which will be revisited and I'm not going to give up easily but it's unlikely I'll listen to it all again in one sitting.
It is possible that She Says Hello is a bit like the magnificent Maria, Maria, Maria or One April Day. Those were the days.
It is roughly what I expected. Once one is so brand loyal, one is only able to be disappointed by how new work doesn't live up to previous achievements and I find it hard to compare with others brands, mainly because I hardly know anything still happening in pop music to compare it to. If I didn't have everything else they'd ever done I might think it was droll, offbeat and brilliant but it's not as droll and brilliant as much of what they've done before. I can't see me being quoted on their website this time.
