THE MAGNETIC FIELDS - i. (Nonsuch) preliminary thoughts - 3 listens

Major label debut. If you don't know the band, or are one of those 'fidelity' fetishists who only likes 69 Love Songs, you won't find this especially illuminating. Good record, though. Now you know.

Everyone else can keep reading. I'm going easy on specific song details because the record doesn't come out for another month and I, at least, always like to be surprised by individual songs when I hear a beloved musician's new thing.

Stylistically i. has the scatteredness of 69LS without the veil of professed universality. I always thought Merritt's claim to have hit every possible style of music only made 69LS weaker, turning jokes like "Punk Rock Love" pretentious or snide. So its fine with me for i. to be a mixed bag if it's okay with Merritt that the musical choices have to justify themselves one by one.

I hope the instrumentation is not, as some people have suggested, a play for mainstream success, because I think the only people to whom these arrangements will sound mild are Magnetic Fields fans; the ukelele has as much power to annoy as ever. Maybe more now that it's obviously not going away. At the same time, Merritt gives every impression of wanting to curb many of his idiosyncracies, starting with the rerecorded "I Don't Believe You" (smoothed out, slowed down).

I don't know whether I'm mistaking cause and effect here, but it seems like Merritt's desire to reconcile casting his net wide with beating his distancing devices into ploughshares has led him over time to squeeze as much eclecticism as he can out of existing song forms instead of making his own. He borrows roles more comfortably on i. than 69LS but I'm not convinced that playing chameleon can take him where he's trying to go.

My favorite parts: One song that sounds like a Charm Of The Highway Strip stray makes me grin whenever I hear it; I can accept this might be a retro/stodgy/closed-minded kind of enjoyment and will try not to stake my opinion of other songs on whether they someday delight me the same way, but it makes me happy. Two other songs develop a particular kind of pastiche that was either not found on 69LS or was handled so flimsily that I don't remember it, and since I think Stephin does it well I hope he does it more... then there are the two songs that nearly make me cry, the most-stylized track on the album and the least-. I'll write more about them when the record's commercially available.