The Magnetic Fields - Love at the Bottom of the Sea

The Magnetic Fields, Love at the Bottom of the Sea (Merge)

Being the owner of perhaps 35 Gregory Isaacs vinyl LP's, not all of which are masterpieces, it might be asked at what stage I should have realized and stopped buying them. I think I suffer from a brand loyalty syndrome that stops short of completism but makes me continue buying from the same mountebanks long after their cures have been revealed as ineffective.
Nobody would expect The Magnetic Fields to repeat the performance of 69 Love Songs but its pervasive influence keeps whispering that every subsequent release is still from the same purveyors and since we don't expect it to be quite as good, perhaps don't notice that it might not be much good at all.
The single, Andrew In Drag, is a neat enough exercise but we are used to such outrageousness and wit now and regard it as perfunctory. What has survived from 69 Love Songs is the doodling on studio equipment, using funny new noises whenever possible. It was never the most intriguing side of the Merritt personality and one tires more quickly of a quirky new synthesizer effect than one does a dark, lyrical masterpiece. The closest we get to that on this album though are the modulations on a theme of I'd Go Anywhere with Hugh, which stands out immediately.
The unsatisfactory cupboard of out-takes and oddments that was the Merritt Obscurities album was excusable as such productions come with a warning that they might be for devotees only but here either the Merritt seam has been mined to exhaustion or his best efforts are being saved for other projects. It's only in places but, as had happened before, traces of old pop standards crop up in the tunes. In Andrew in Drag it is Flowers in the Rain; on I've Run Away to Join the Fairies it's Those Were the Days; Infatuation might have been Depeche Mode before they matured into their tin-pot early hits.
So it's a shame that any artists comes so burdened as to be forever in the shadow of previous great work. On the other hand, we admirers have a more difficult job having to admit that if the new album wasn't from our heroes we would never have thought of buying it. The album has a limited number of chances to convince before it gets dispatched to a more distant CD rack and once it's on there it will find it very hard to get off. I wish it all the best.