Music

Too clever for pop music by half, Stephin Merritt always likes to set himself an additional challenge. With the same spirit of playful intellectualism/obsessive compulsion that saw Ernest Vincent Wright compose an entire novel without the letter ‘e’, the droll New Yorker’s last two albums as The Magnetic Fields saw him pen 14 songs beginning with a single letter (2004’s ‘i’) and three CDs-worth of material on a single topic. The latter, 1999’s ‘69 Love Songs’, ran the gamut from disco and showtunes to punk and free jazz while providing such a comprehensive rundown of the various stages and states of human infatuation that governments should issue a copy to each citizen upon their twelfth birthday.

For the eighth MF album, the concept is pure muso. Essentially, Merritt set out ‘to sound more like The Jesus and Mary Chain than The Jesus and Mary Chain’, which meant spending a lot of time and ingenuity making every instrument, including the cello, accordion and piano, feed back.  This may sound grumpily perverse, like scribbling over a nice picture in black crayon. In fact, as the fuzz roars and its tunes chime distantly like a broken musical box, ‘Distortion’ exudes the carefree air of being pleasantly wankered. ‘Sober, life is a prison,’ Merritt observes on ‘Too Drunk to Dream’. ‘Shit-faced it is a blessing.’