The Magnetic Fields - 50 Song Memoir
The Magnetic Fields - 50 Song Memoir
Now here is a genuine feast of a record. Honestly, it might be better to consume this meal over multiple sittings. But, if you try to do it all in one go, there's a sort of wonderful build-up that occurs. As Stephen Merritt tells the stories of the first fifty years of his life over the course of fifty songs (each titled for a year from 1966 to 2015), the variety and the richness of the emotional experience being recounted and represented in the music becomes very affecting as it's layered on. I found myself a bit choked up by the time I got to 1983's tune: Foxx And I. It's just lovely how there are so many contradictions in mood. There's humour and there's depression, there's uncertainty and there's confidence, there's nostalgia and there's regret. It's a lot like life, really.
So yeah, it's great when viewed as a whole. But that's not to say that it isn't great moment to moment as well. The songwriting is way more consistent than anyone would expect on a collection this large. As ever, Merritt's employing his signature baritone to rumble out simple pop and folk melodies laid on top of ramshackle electronics and rhythms, or earthy acoustics. But the band shifts it's style around a bit here, often to match the era that each song is ostensibly set in. I hear folk and psychedelia in the '60s, glam, disco and blues rock in the '70s, and the New Romantics and synth-pop in the '80s. From the '90s on, the music seems to echo whatever the Magnetic Fields' sound was in the year in question. It almost doubles as a history of pop music itself.
There's a lot of stuff on here, so nearly everyone's bound to find to something they like. I happened to like just about all of it. Strongly recommended.
Stream in full below via Bandcamp.
Highlights: '73: It Could Have Been Paradise • '83: Foxx And I • '08: Surfin'
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