69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields' three-volume concept album released in 1999, is the rare musical experiment gone so horribly right that it nearly completely disintegrates anything else released by the artist, before or after. Even the annoying genre interludes like "Experimental Music Love" or "Punk Love" had such a winning sense of purpose they were hard to hate. And the real tunes, well, they were the stunners that a tour de force of love songs damn well better promise. Find me a man not bowled to tears by "The Book of Love" or sweetened to cheering by "The Night You Can't Remember" and I'll buy the fucking liar a hearing aid.
So in the wake of 69 Love Songs we in criticland understandably get a bit crabby dissecting Stephin Merritt's follow-ups. i: too egotistical! Look, i was great up until that wrenching second half. "In an Operetta," oof. I'm willing to soften up for the new Distortion on the charge that it's not 69 Love Songs. It's not even a concept record; the title's there to tell you of its recording process and not much else. There's no distortion in Merritt's shallow hatred of the title annoyance in "California Girls," or his ultimate decision to weigh the pros and cons, sober and shitfaced, in "Too Drunk to Dream." The music may be drowned to the hums in static worthy of Kevin Drumm, but the sentiments are wry and plainspoken as ever.
Love is still encountered, as always, but even more monosyllabically than usually befits a wunderkind of deadpan's métier. "Three-Way"'s whole lyric is the title. The track brings you no closer to having one yourself, or even concluding that Merritt is indulging in ménage à trois, but it captures a warped jolliness nonetheless. "Old Fools" is hardly more than a long, beautiful sigh that "old rules take the backseat to new romancing," but it's still beautiful. He might not have another 69 left in him, but the man still knows a thing or two about love, even if it's passed him and his feedbacking fuzzboxes by.
Distortion is really a triumph of the evening-out. Nothing reaches out and kisses (or kisses off, for that matter) like "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" or "I Don't Believe You," but not a one approaches a foot of the unlistenable nadir of the solo Showtunes. What's important is that even as tempos slow to a crawl on "Mr. Mistletoe," the return to melody every which way is worth the gush. Tunes like "Xavier Says" seem more forgettable than they are, buried under all that crafty studio mud, until they return like a boomerang in the sandwich line or something. Just try and make "Drive On, Driver" blink in this regard. Likewise, if "Too Drunk to Dream" doesn't do it on first listen, get yourself too fried to cry and try it dancing. It's a blessing, shitfaced or not.
