The Magnetic Fields— Love at the Bottom of the Sea

Here’s the thing: Stephin Merritt does whatever he wants, and doesn’t seem to care what we—or even his own band for that matter—think.

The Magnetic Fields are two decades old and Love at the Bottom of the Sea puts a clean ten LPs under their belts. Even though Merritt hates touring, the band can sell out theaters and concert halls throughout this nation and beyond and attract legions of fans spanning the age range—his bands’ oeuvre is that deep, their stature that great.

But ultimately, this latest album will mostly find it buried among the superiors that preceded and will hopefully follow. The disappointment is straightforward enough, and there aren’t any culpably distracting affectations employed here (the tinny Jesus and Mary Chain production of 2008’s Distortion once annoyed me, it’s now a favorite album). Though the Magnetic Fields have never tried to craft cuddly, friend-to-all pop songs, the hit rate for the melodies here is about 0.5.

Lead single “Andrew in Drag,” the story of a gay man who falls in love with his friend’s gender-bending female persona, is a shining success. The opening lines, “A pity she does not exist, a shame he’s not a fag/ The only girl I ever loved was Andrew in Drag,” pair the bizarre, likely-unrelated details of a vibrant narrative with the kind of universally felt, ineffable emotions that just couldn’t punch as hard in the context of a too-conventional stories.

Unfortunately, conventional is what too many of these tracks can be mistaken for; instead of emphasizing Merritt’s sardonic, linguistically complex turns of phrase, the musical arrangements mask the songwriting prowess. The maximalist ethos at work here, all whirlygag synths among unnameable instruments, has been done better on most of the group’s ’90s albums.

And while Merritt’s demented sense of humor, evident on tracks like “God Wants Us to Wait,” “Your Girlfriend’s Face” and “I’ve Run Away to Join the Faeries” remains intact, or possibly even brightened by his recent West Coast immigration, the deeply human undercurrents that grounded the camp sensibilities of songs on 69 Love Songs and Holiday and Charm of the Highway Strip are either missing or inaudible.

The Magnetic Fields’ strange powers have yielded fundamentally classic love songs reconfigured into alien pop-things by Merritt’s evil genius imagination. Love at the Bottom of the Sea lacks that magic.

—Brian Contratto