Magnetic Fields - Distortion (2008)

What is wrong with this album? I'd like to label it another scantily portioned conceptual failure, on the same level as 2004's equally shoddy i, but I can't just leave it at that. The problems go deeper. The good parts, however, are better, and this leaves Distortion as more inherently flawed but also more interesting.

i failed at a basic level because its theme was so arbitrary (14 songs all beginning with the same letter!) and pointless. Maybe, following the sucess of 69 Love Songs, Merritt was making a backhanded comment of the impotence of concept albums themselves, but the songs were so anemic that it didn't matter either way. The only passable material seemed cropped straight from 69, the rest was fey baroque trash lacking most of the humor Merritt needs so badly to temper his usual melancholy.

Distortion's concept doesn't fail so totally, but it's not very good either. Basically it's a thick varnish of shoegaze fuzz, with guitar and twinkling piano floating in space behind the static line of Merrit's bassy voice. It seems a shame at first, like the opaque sheen of the production is blocking some kind of brilliance inside, but this really isn't the case. This is a gelatin mold in which a mediocre album is trapped.

Case in point: "California Girls." The album's first vocal track takes ridiculous shots at the title girls ("looking down their perfect noses / at me and my kind") on its way to an intensely stupid revenge fantasy. Is this supposed to be clever? Me and my kind? This speaks of some bitter, sophomoric victimization fetish and Merritt sounds like a teenager commisserating with the rest of the drama clique. It's a shame, because his songs really click when their bitterness is reflexively aware of itself, turning the joke around on itself. This is just empty whining at the most obvious of targets.

Again, I'll concede that maybe the lyrics are working on some ironic plane that I cannot comprehend, but it's nearly impossible to tell, mired as they are in this bowl of pea soup and sung by frequent contributor Claudia Gonson, whose voice is as flat as Merritt's without any of the wry knowingness.