Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Heather Laird |
The Magnetic Fields’ Realism is a companion piece to 2008’s Distortion. Songwriter and lead vocalist Stephen Merritt originally thought of the two records as a pair, having wanted to title them True and False, but couldn’t decide which one should be which. WhileDistortion directly recalled The Jesus and Mary Chain, Realism is a softer album – “variety folk,” as Merritt describes it. Merritt, guitarist John Woo, cellist Sam Davol and pianist Claudia Gonson (who occasionally contributes drums to the band, but there are none to be found here) create sing-alongs, toy-box melodies, instrumentally broad and lyrically clever tracks that are thematically sporadic. You can’t help but find yourself equally immersed in the childlike hoedown ‘We Are Having A Hootenanny’ as in the dreary ‘Walk A Lonely Road.’
Acoustic instruments are delightfully strewn about the tracks: banjos, cellos, accordions, tubas, bouzoukis, tablas, and violins. Still, you find yourself caught up in Merritt’s fascinating lyrics trying to figure out the self pitying ‘Always Already Gone,’ or the unforgiving ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ where Merritt embodies a pregnant woman rejected at the alter: “I think I might drink a few and maybe the baby will, too.” Then there’s the random, joyous holiday track ‘Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree’ (“if they don’t like you, screw them / don’t leave your fortune to them”), which concludes with an excellently strange German verse. The album comes to a close with ‘From a Sinking Boat,’ a song about a shipwreck that completely shatters the characters he created in the songs before it, leaving you with an unexpected sense of hopelessness, and yet, feeling refreshed.
