The cute little booklet included features a lengthy interview as well as handwritten texts, and lists the vast panorama of instruments that Merritt plays, which are exotic strings to strum or pluck, keyboards of specific technical specifications and percussion. So, if we begin on ukelele, there is any amount of electronica and studio artistry to come, the arrangements and production being rococo and magnificent in their own right. This is finally where all the doodling and exploration of synthesizers that filled out the 69 album become integral to the songs and not avant garde for avant garde's sake.
If, like Philip Larkin, the lyricism with a dark side has matured into a more outright sardonic misanthropy, one can't help but start ticking off musical references as they occur as one track evokes The Human League, another perhaps Tom Waits, then Duane Eddy, Scott Walker and, most gloriously, in the wonderful The Blizzard of '78,
The first band I'd had was called 1 1/2,
We were a duo, technically,
So if Tonto's Expanding Head Band were a band, so were we.
Stephin often has a laissez-faire attitude towards phrasing, scansion and rhyme, disdaining them as if they were beneath his dignity although it is possible that the best songs on 69 were better made than most of these. That doesn't prevent a very impressive percentage of these being obvious classics on first hearing. 71 I Think I'll Make Another World is where it becomes clear that Merritt, who hasn't been away, is back on his exclusive level of top form if ever we doubted it. 73 It Could Have Been Paradise two tracks later lays morose thoughts over a shimmering arrangement to confirm all the trademark ambivalence of his finest work.
There's snow in 73 and it recurs as a theme, as do a morbid fixation with death, disco and, predictably, love and plenty of explicit sex.
76 Hustle 76 is, one would like to think, a loving tribute to disco but with Stephin at his most Phil Oakey, the autobiographical premise of the album, which is not always explicit, can be traced from 66 Wonder Where I'm From, through such epochs, including the AIDS epidemic and relationships that didn't last, to the dedication in the final song ostensibly to the latest love.
92 Weird Diseases, explains that,
Once, from eating recalled cheeses, I got weird diseases.
over a loose percussion track with sitar embroidered around it like Bernard Butler on a Suede track whereas 94 Haven't Got a Penny picks up reggae stylings taken from lover's rock, Junior Murvin and the Trojan label. I hope the next album develops out of this beautifully done pastiche. It was the first to earn itself an instant replay and is likely to be the first to be worn out. If this track is allowed a gentle fade, most finish abruptly, having done what they had to do and then move on, packing in as much as possible in the same way that Elvis Costello's Get Happy! was so full of song ideas there was not space, or the need, on an LP, to repeat to fade and make a four minute song out of a two and a half minute one.
98 Lovers' Lies is a tender crooner,
A strong sense of the absurd's
No defense from lovers' words,
all the longing and desperation only made deeper by its cynicism. This is the Scott Walker track.
01 Have You Seen It in the Snow apparently works in the opposite direction, arguing for moving poetic beauty in an otherwise drab city as Disc 4 finishes with a number of elegies, not all to friends, though, there is 02 Be True to Your Bar, which laments the loss of community; 13 Big Enough for Both of Us asks the addressee to 'hold it in his hand', referring to his heart, of course.
One of my previous reviews of a Magnetic Fields gigs was quoted on their website for its big but steadfastly held claim that they were 'the best band in the world'. I don't know about many bands these days, being more of a Buxtehude man by now, but this hilarious, dark, droll, magnificent, moving album confirms all the prejudice I ever had in Stephin Merritt's favour. I honestly didn't expect he could do 69 Love Songs again, nothing as gorgeous, askance and bitter but I think he probably has. I haven't even mentioned the best track, 86 How I Failed Ethics, because it's not possible to say how smartarse, beautiful and profound it is.
