Review Summary: All the basics of a The Magnetic Fields album are intact, but the way that Merritt and Company spin them is delectable.
Distortion's title is one of Merritt's ironic tidbits. No, it isn't an exploration of Stephin Merritt's cleaner aspects, in fact it's actually what its title suggests: a distortion of The Magnetic Fields's sound. It's ironic because Merritt's defying his character for just a brief second: he's not using misnomers to suggest something incongruous with reason, but instead he's being incongruous with his own nature. It's ironic isn't it? Most of us would figure that Merritt was stuck in his old ways (which wouldn't be such a band thing, looking at tracks like "Take Ecstasy With Me" and "I Think I Need A New Heart"), but said ironic anti-irony could symbolize The Magnetic Fields undergoing a stylistic shift of sorts. Hadn't Merritt shown enough evidence that there was potential for such a change already? He'd promised to banish synthesizers entirely for three works straight, which went against everything that the band's debut,
Distant Plastic Trees, as well as its successor
The Wayward Bus stood for. But the band had evolved from that simplicity in favor of a far more organic and diverse sound. Perhaps another stylistic shift was on the horizon?
But Merritt isn't one for drastic changes; small changes are better.
Distortion shows him with all his pop melodies intact, but now they're imbued with a distinct sense of sixties pop music and fuzzy distortion. The guitars mesh with each other in a smeared, abstract way, as most of the melodies do on the aptly titled
Distortion. This is of course, a byproduct of the lo-fi production value, a component of
Distortion best seen on tracks like "Three Way," where a surf riff becomes so altered by the aesthetic that its origin is beyond recognition. "Old Fools" also features squealing axes, which blur into a vast field of not-so-melodic instrumentation, but Merritt's baritone, as always, grounds the music, a task which proves daunting as the album rolls on. Take for example, the boisterous "The Nun's Litany," which combines Jesus and Mary Chain (there's no doubting the resemblance, be sure) guitar feedback, noise, and noise pop ethos with an organ that sneaks in and out of the mix. Or perhaps your poison is "California Girls" where harmonies take the place of said organ, sliding in and out of
Distortion's well-crafted sonic textures. Realize that they are by no means melodies, rather they're aggressive and determined passages of the cantankerous, the layered, and the technologically-manipulated - all adjectives which are completely polar to that of Merritt's voice. His baritone is again elegiac, and serves as the skeletal system while all the fuzzy pop sensibilities flutter away of their own accord. All the basics of a The Magnetic Fields album are intact, but the way that Merritt and Company spin them is perhaps his most lovable and innovative take on their style since
69 Love Songs.
It's no secret that The Magnetic Fields's discography is one where all of the albums share all the same essentials, thus leading to an eerily familiar sound. But an attempt to tweak these elements, and thus destroy the problem of stagnancy on their past few records (
Realism, this one,
i, and
69 Love Songs) has been made. Outside the band's newfound affinity with noise and shoegaze, The Magnetic Fields have also become less reliant on Merritt's concise cynicism, and more reliant on some form of experimentation. Simply put, it's more of what Merritt has put out before, but to such a degree that it will satisfy both fans and those like me who take his "love songs" as they are, but always hope that he'll again expand. For those of "us,"
Distortion is probably the closest thing we're going to get to that expansion, so in due course, let's gobble it up.
