Plumbiferous Media

NYC band The Mag­netic Fields, founded by front­man Stephin Mer­rit in 1989, released its newest album, Real­ism, last month. Real­ism is a bit of a depar­ture from form for the Fields, who, while their last few albums have moved away from the syn­thy exper­i­men­ta­tion of their first five or six albums, have with Real­ism injected a folk-like aes­thetic into their pecu­liar blend of indie-pop. While Real­ism suf­fers from a sub­stan­tial num­ber of flaws and seem­ingly mis­guided deci­sions, the Fields’ cre­ativ­ity shines through at the best moments, leav­ing the album at least occa­sion­ally interesting.

As with the major­ity of Mag­netic Fields albums, Mer­rit pro­vides the major­ity of the vocals for Real­ism, occa­sion­ally with sub­stan­tial effects on top. At cer­tain points on Real­ism (and through much of his band’s music), Merrit’s voice works per­fectly - a calm and deep into­na­tion well-suited to the more sub­dued tracks, such as Real­ism’s clos­ing track, “From A Sink­ing Boat.” How­ever, in many places, an overuse of effects (espe­cially on sec­ondary vocal­ist Clau­dia Gonson’s sec­tions) pushes Real­ism’s vocal seg­ments towards being irri­tat­ing rather than ben­e­fi­cial to the music. In the case of Gonson’s vocals, it also doesn’t help that she can’t seem to avoid sound­ing irri­tat­ing with­out any effects what­so­ever, though Mer­rit is for­tu­nately the main vocal­ist most of the time. When Merrit’s vocals work, every­thing seems to come together. We just wish that hap­pened much more often.

As with much of The Mag­netic Fields’ work, Real­ism is a com­bi­na­tion of more seri­ous tracks (such as “From A Sink­ing Boat”) and tracks which use humor or humor­ous set­tings to vary­ing effect. There’s “Inter­lude,” which does lit­tle but to serve as a some­what con­fus­ingly mis­guided inter­lude (unsur­pris­ingly) between “You Must Be Out of Your Mind,” which includes the amus­ing line “And I no longer drink enough / To think you’re witty,” and “We Are Hav­ing A Hoo­te­nanny,” which, given its awful lyrics (see its title), is most dis­tin­guished by its use of the word “hoo­te­nanny” and the deci­sion to extend the vaguely sibi­lant sounds at the end of words such as “quiz” into a buzzing noise. After that there’s “I Don’t Know What To Say,” which dis­plays Merrit’s skill at writ­ing - and then “The Dolls’ Tea Party,” which doesn’t. After the beau­ti­fully sar­cas­tic “Every­thing Is One Big Christ­mas Tree” (which at one point breaks into Ger­man), the album fluc­tu­ates between inter­est­ing and markedly mediocre - the dif­fer­ence between “Seduced and Abused” and “Painted Flower.” At 35 min­utes, Real­ism is short enough that sug­gest­ing that some of the worst tracks be thrown out is unhelp­ful, but it’s quite dis­ap­point­ing to have really good tracks sand­wiched between mediocrity.

For an album that takes a step back from exper­i­men­ta­tion in favor of some extra folk, Real­ism is sur­pris­ingly diverse. It seems that even though the band’s exper­i­men­tal ten­den­cies have been focused upon folk, they can’t help but still play around with all sorts of instru­men­ta­tion, among other ele­ments. In fact, one of the only things more impres­sive than the vari­a­tion in instru­men­ta­tion is the use of an extremely large tonal range, eas­ily likened to that of a full organ (some of which ven­ture as low as 4Hz, and span over 8 octaves). And this extreme use of range is found not only with instru­ments, but also, often, with the vocals.

But even while on much of the album The Mag­netic Fields make a point of remain­ing, to some extent, exper­i­men­tal, there is a core set of tracks that remains mostly the same. These tracks, while often attempt­ing to broaden their sound base, gen­er­ally just revert right back to using a rather sim­ple gui­tar line, plus assorted accom­pa­ni­ment. Placed among the other, much more inter­est­ing tracks, these are sim­ply boring.

Real­ism as a whole main­tains diver­sity not only in sound, instru­men­ta­tion, range, tempo, and so on, but also in over­all qual­ity. There are cer­tainly a good num­ber of very solid tracks, then there are the fairly decent, but some­what mediocre tracks, and Real­ism enter­tains the truly awful tracks, such as “We Are Hav­ing a Hoo­te­nanny,” with its some­what painful lyrics and the irri­tat­ing buzzing with which the vocal­ists fill oth­er­wise empty mea­sures. As a whole, Real­ism is right about mediocre.

This post is tagged 40-49, The Magnetic Fields