Realism by The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields’ Stephen Merritt is a joker so before the lyrics even begin he gets his three biggest laughs out of the way: the album’s title in association with a band notorious for insincerity and cynicism, the album’s title in association with a female silhouette on the cover as direct juxtaposition to the male silhouette on the band’s previous album Distortion, and the album’s title in association with its sonic theme of American folk music and acoustic accompaniment (as if either have anything to do with realism). As per usual he is obviously crafting an obtuse album where every word matters, where the song about the ex-lovers has nothing to do with love and the song about paint has everything to do with it. In its 35 minutes, Realism, creates the least realistic and perhaps coldest record Merritt has ever made. It’s the sound of someone getting so invested in the lie they’re telling that they start to believe it themselves.

Take “Better Things” one of the standouts here, which regales a myriad of mythological creatures before floating into the CSN chorus ”I have heard the singing of real birds/ Not those absurd birds that simply everyone has heard”. It shows what fools we are in love and in music. Those 69 Songs aren’t about love at all, realism isn’t real. We Are Having a Hootenanny” is a great match.com send up, and the typically ridiculous “Seduced and Abandoned” is required listening for those who think Twilight: New Moon is the epitome of romanticism. All these songs have a brilliant slant, which Merritt delivers in his apathetic bass, playing with perspective, the ideas of truth, often brilliantly but unnecessarily when the tunes don’t hold up. “Walk a Lonely Road” and “From A Sinking Boat” both regale heartbreak in some of the laziest and least interesting tunes Merritt has written. Really the novelties here are the standouts and none are as powerful as about 45 of the 69 Love Songs. This is an album that makes you think more than it makes you feel, and most of that thinking comes from the cover art. To be fair, I’ll thinking about those male-female silhouettes for a long time. Distortion and Realism are male and female respectively; he certainly makes you work for it. It is usually better than this. 3/5