What Brian Wilson does because he’s crazy, Merritt does ironically: He grieves for adults tangled up in teeny-bopper dreams.
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By staying inside those lines, Merritt illuminates another murky space, the one between dumb songs and smart people. They follow the three-minute pop song formula, which is as strict as a sonnet’s. As Merritt says of his work, “It’s about the songs.” The quiet, spare show showcased just how rich those songs are.
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In concert, he transformed these after-the-happy-ending girl-group songs: A slowed-down “Summer Lies” sounded more like a Renaissance ballad, but remained beautifully despondent. Merritt’s vocals on the songs from the first two Fields records were as big a twist as the instrumentation: Susan Anway sang on 1990’s Distant Plastic Trees and 1991’s The Wayward Bus in an ethereal soprano that couldn’t be farther from Merritt’s sardonic drawl. Gonson, who is usually the band’s drummer, pounded out what backbeat was needed on the guts-exposed piano, while Davol’s cello case stood in visually on traps, propped upright back and center. The banjo also added a mournful fillip to Davol’s drone, changing the texture but not the mood of the disco-Goth “Smoke and Mirrors” and “The Desperate Things You Made Me Do” from the Fields’ last album, Get Lost. The banjo was the velvet monkey wrench, the sound that doesn’t fit but eventually makes sense, which Merritt achieves on records by hooking a Slinky to his guitar pickup or using a Radio Shack oscillator as a theremin. The brand-new quartet resonated in unexpected ways that night. “It’s practically a bluegrass band,” says Merritt, who spoke with me before the Magnetic Fields’ show at the Black Cat last Saturday and briefly afterward as he darted around the club, fretting that the cigarette machine might not take bills. Rather than twiddle knobs onstage, Merritt has opted to tour with himself on guitar, Claudia Gonson on piano, Sam Davol on cello, and John Woo on banjo. A few ringers come in to add instrumental tracks guest vocalists are sent tapes to sing onto. The record-making Magnetic Fields is mostly Merritt in his pajamas. Things that sound like (or are) harpsichords and tubas and Korg Poly 800s and static swirl together like Phil Spector’s club mix of some Joy Division-Partridge Family-Leonard Cohen hybrid. He processes and reprocesses sounds with all the toys, then layers them onto a simple skeleton of verse-chorus-verse, hooks to die for, and short, usually rhyming lines. Merritt produces records as the Magnetic Fields and also juggles several side projects in New York, where he lives with dozens of instruments, 20 synthesizers among them, and his recording equipment. His characters recriminate, they rue, they give up hope, but they are always ready to be amused. Merritt sings his three-minute tales of regret with charming dissociation, like a synth-pop Oscar Wilde. The songs of Stephin Merritt float in the space between how love feels and how it’s supposed to feel, or, worse, how it did feel, but only for a weekend at the beach four years ago.