The Magnetic Fields: Classic or Dud?

challop morelike

(yeah it's totally fine, of course, I'm just surprised)

I think most people who came to TMF in the 90s prefer the Distant Plastic Trees -- Get Lost run to 69LS, I sure do, not that 69 isn't a great record -- I go back to "100,000 Fireflies" and "Take Ecstasy with Me" and "Plant White Roses" and "Born on a Train" and "You Love To Fail" (and for that matter "Dream Hat") and etc. way more than anything from the later stuff.

same tbh. not that there aren't good things after 69LS (e.g. I like Distortion quite a bit) but it does seem like a dividing line for me where I love everything before it and that's where I find I'm cherry picking songs and not rating the albums as a whole that much.

Interesting - pretty sure most the Mag Fields fans I have known regard 69LS and its material as the group's zenith (to the point that bootlegs of the related live shows are traded, etc.)

I love Get Lost but I see the point about the shift. The first two albums in particular are such a self-contained, gauzy bubble, there's no way something like "Living In an Abandoned Firehouse with You" would fit on the later albums. As time goes on his writing sharpens, for ex "The Desperate Things You Made Me Do" is a stunning, brutal song, but you lose the entrancing nature of things like "Lovers From the Moon."

I think I'd first heard a few songs from 69LS that I liked and then became obsessed with the Susan Amway version of "Take Ecstasy With Me," I never really listen to 69LS as an album, or even a third of an album.

Yeah, his lyrics seem to be much showier and more self-consciously literary on 69LS, often at the music's expense

I think most people who came to TMF in the 90s prefer the Distant Plastic Trees -- Get Lost run to 69LS, I sure do, not that 69 isn't a great record -- I go back to "100,000 Fireflies" and "Take Ecstasy with Me" and "Plant White Roses" and "Born on a Train" and "You Love To Fail" (and for that matter "Dream Hat") and etc. way more than anything from the later stuff.

This is me. "69 Love Songs" was honestly where I more or less got off the boat. And the Sixths might be the one I listen to the most.

Interesting - pretty sure most the Mag Fields fans I have known regard 69LS and its material as the group's zenith (to the point that bootlegs of the related live shows are traded, etc.)

― punching the clock on a tambo (morrisp), Sunday, 20 February 2022 17:52 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this feels to me to be a product of that album's relatively colossal profile - hype generating hype - and I wouldn't be surprised if for a lot of them it was their introduction to the band and therefore set an expectation for what they are and what they do best

in the same way that approaching them chronologically (but also all at once) might lead one to conclude that the best stuff happens earlier

will def detour to Sixths after this

Nah, they were into them already (tho 69LS may be said to have taken their fandom to new heights - being the achievement that it is). It's cool, everyone's different.

Was it mentioned on that 'every artist has a New Jersey' thread I wonder lol

and to be absolutely clear my primary agenda is far less to attempt a downward reevaluation of 69LS than it is to obtain the inverse for Charm and Holiday, which I honestly wouldn't have even heard of but for a recent IRL suggestion that I try their early discography

Yeah, I'm curious what you'll make of that first 6ths album (Wasps' Nests), which came out between Holiday and Get Lost. As was mentioned upthread, it might have more in common with what came after it than what came before, but I also think it's one of Merritt's best sounding albums, second only to Charm.

And if you haven't listened to the House of Tomorrow EP yet, I always think of that as being of a piece with Holiday.

Ty!

Am finding 69LS disc 2 to be an improvement over disc 1, funnily enough

Wait you didn’t even listen to the whole thing yet(?)

It's really long okay

Combining it with reading Hollinghurst works pretty well tbh, maybe I'm liking it a bit more as a soundtrack to fiction

Yeah, I see I didn't read yr original post closely enough... the volume of material is central to the "point," there's a reason it wasn't 23 Love Songs.

I'm Sorry I Love You is pretty rad, if only more of the album had done insane stuff like this! Wind-tunnel industrial-Celtic!

Don’t forget Future Bible Heroes (especially “A Thousand Lovers in a Day”).

ty!

done with 69LS, going back to Holiday before moving on. really my absolute #1 takeaway from all this is that 'The Trouble I've Been Looking For' is the single greatest song ever, and everyone who's never used wonky detuned keyboard riffs in pop is an idiot and a wuss

the volume of material is central to the "point,"

yeah there's clear reasons why it's considered his opus but i also wish even a single disc of it was as great to listen to front-to-back as what came before

OTM.

He toured here for 69LS and I remember talking to people, while waiting, echoing "the old stuff ia better" type sentiments even in 2000 or whatever. It's not easily dismissed as revisionist challops, etc.

there's also a little lost with the shift in focus to more acoustic arrangements compared to the very distinct take on synthpop that was dominant before

still a lot to love about it & there's more than enough high-points of course

xp Where is "here"? Just curious

'how to take simple chords and alchemise astonishing songs out of them through imaginative textures, arrangements and melodic lines' was the operative part of the comparison

― imago, Sunday, February 20, 2022

I still don't think this makes the comparison convincing. The terms here are too general for a genuine likeness to be created.

You could probably take the above and apply it to, say, Michael Jackson.

From a very very limited acquaintance with the Big Thief band, they seem totally different from TMF.

I disagree with Imago: I came to the conclusion about 20 years ago that 69 Love Songs was, indeed, the best TMF LP, indeed Merritt LP, and I maintain that.

The first two LPs are, in their way, stunning - distinctive, perverse, beautiful - I think that's well recognised.

HOLIDAY I have always found overrated.

TCOTHS is stunning again - so as far as that goes, I agree with Imago on it.

GET LOST: here Imago is on to something. There *is*, I think, a shift to GET LOST, as the production gets richer and the songs longer. I would say about half that LP is great (smoke & mirrors, love is lighter than air, etc) and half of it is sub-par.

69LS I think was doing something rather different - obviously 'high concept', 'quantity altering quality', etc etc - and I don't believe at all that 69LS was a reaction to something that had gone wrong with GET LOST. Nothing that Merritt ever said in the 1990s gave any evidence for this as part of the intention, and I have never ever heard it, intuitively, when listening either.

Post-69LS is a different issue where the problem clearly becomes "How to follow that?". But he has, in fact, continued to make tons of music that's greater than most people could make.

It's also true, as I think some people have pointed out here, that the number of side projects / other bands complicates any serious chronological account of what Merritt was doing or thought he was doing.

I tried directly to raise the "what next?" issue here, I think 21 years ago:

Little Man, What Now?

That's all fair, pinefox. I realise that my reaction was in part a reaction to the total shift away from the sonic bath of the earlier albums that I'd become so intoxicated by. It is clear that his ambitions were very different for 69LS, and that something more literary and self-consciously 'eclectic' was being undertaken. To my ears, it is a very interesting failure interspersed with moments of success, but I think one's response to it probably depends on how much you regard its ambitions as being met by the music.

(and how much you are able to disregard an album as a single unified listening experience rather than a document that can be edited by the listener)

As for Holiday, well, I guess the manic bubblegum synthestra vibe is something of an acquired taste, which I happen to already have in great quantities, lol

The idea that 69LS is a failure - feels to me like saying that pop music is a failure.

HOLIDAY: it's not really about the sound, I just don't think most of the songs are as good.

As for "literary": offhand I'd say that the first LP is the most literary.

One example:

You're in your own little world: an expensive birdcage;
Like a plastic baby in a Faberge egg
I saw you today at the Cafe Blase
And thought of the nights when we had fire fights
Nameless seaside ghost town...
That's where I go when I see the moon
Living in an abandoned firehouse with you
You're in your own little head in a field of sunflowers
And there's blood in your mouth and there's rats all over town
(C): Take me out to the beach and I'll tell you my secret name
Take me under the sea and we'll derail the trains
Let's run away into the caves I still love you I still love you baby
You're in your own little box with ribbons in your hair
And there's dust in your mouth and worms in the air
Hideous city of unknown words...
That's where I live when I go to sleep
In an abandoned firehouse with you.

All day snow covered us
Night-time: it was always night
The people on the street were made of meat
Black girl, trucks ran us down
Blue boy...
The people on the sidewalk were traced in chalk
Whale embryos filled your enormous room
Screech-owl kachinas built your spiritual room
We were kings, kings!
We were kings, kings!

That seems to me vastly more literary than anything on 69 Love Songs.

Pop music is not generally consumed over the course of three hours ;)

Holiday and Wasp's Nest are my two favorite Merritt albums. I like 69LS but I don't really enjoy the non-songs like "Punk Rock Love", even in concept and that makes it drag a bit. Disk 2 stands up with his all time works though, despite it all.

Holiday's sound MAKES the songs good imo; if they were performed on an acoustic guitar with no adornment they'd lose a lot, sure, but the whole point for me is how the mesh of sound evokes something far beyond the basic chords

Oh another Disc 2 supremacist! High five lol

Pop music is not generally consumed over the course of three hours ;)

I don't understand this comment.

Well, I am calling 69LS a (very interesting and frequently successful) failure as an album experience. I don't think it impugns pop music to learn that three hours of it by one artist - even one who is clearly blessed with genius - is a fluctuating and not entirely satisfying experience. I don't think ANYONE could have pulled off 69LS, to be clear. Not even Big Thief!

"not entirely satisfying" doesn't sound like "failure", to me.

Talking to someone else today, coincidentally, who likes 69LS about as much as I do, I typed:

CD1 > CD2 >>>>>>> CD3.

The first 2 discs are both staggeringly great, but I think that CD1 wins through feeling even more like a "greatest hits" or "the new standards of our generation" -- a disc in which you can have, let's say: I don't believe in the sun, all my little words, a chicken with its head cut off, the luckiest guy, come back from SF, etc etc, all blazing at you one after another within the first 10 songs -- remains to my mind an achievement that I have not heard surpassed since.

The effect of that is not so different from (or at least one can make the analogy with), let's say: a little help from my friends, fixing a hole, lucy in the sky with diamonds, she's leaving home, all on one side of vinyl.

CD2 I would see more in terms of being continually surprisingly good ie: you can't believe how one great song follows another but almost of them have been underrated and, by most people, almost forgotten, until they come on. A bit less hit-parade and more LP-track in flavour.

I mean, I think of Scott Miller at his most extravagant and eclectic, and he never got an album beyond 74 minutes. 69LS is more than twice that length! Lolita Nation, Plants & Birds & Rocks & Things and Interbabe Concern shunted together would compare maybe, but it'd also probably detract from the impact (and distinct energy) of each to try and view them all as a single undertaking (although the quality of the music would at least be consistently high - because they were originally conceived of individually)

Much of 69LS Disc 1 feels sonically slight to me, and I think this is once again a matter of personal preference.

I've never heard of any of those things or titles.

I admit that I am deeply out of touch (ie: ignorant), hence for me to say "nothing has been better than 69LS since 1999" would be factually rather meaningless (though if I did now hear another 500 LPs from that period it probably wouldn't change my mind, indeed would actually leave me thinking that statement was true).

Scott Miller is a direct contemporary of Merritt's. He stands as a comparably brilliant highly literary and idiosyncratic (though rooted in classicism) American songwriter. I strongly recommend those albums (by Game Theory and The Loud Family, his vehicles)

I say 'is'; tragically, I mean 'was'.

And I'll add that 69LS was Miller's favourite album by TMF, and he didn't put any of their other albums on his year-end lists, so he's with you rather than me here

(it was indeed his favourite album of 1999)

I'd have to reread poster Imago's posts more closely to be sure of this, but it looks to me that, among other things (eg: 'sonic slightness', which might be a more credible and / or novel complaint to my mind), they are rehearsing a view that was debated long ago, maybe on this thread, maybe elsewhere (even Facebook?), by several of us, which is basically:

"60 love songs is too long - if it were cut down by about 75% then it would have a higher ratio of great songs and I'd like it more".

This seems in one way rational. But I don't agree with it because, as various people (including me, but certainly also including one-time poster Stevie T) tried to say in the past: There is a different effect from creating a larger work in which the smaller parts interrelate -- and thus get "added value" from their participation in the whole.

The concept of a "concept" is relevant here though I don't think the particular concept (Love) is so important.

If we take the view "if it were cut down by about 75% then it would have a higher ratio of great songs and I'd like it more" literally then we might logically cut it down to one song - the one we like best - and it will have a 100% success rate and finally be judged a ... "success".

We could also take another large work of interconnected parts like ULYSSES and say: at 700pp this is too long, it would be better at 350pp, or 70pp, with just the best sentences, or just the essence of the story.

Some people like Roddy Doyle have even virtually said this!

But this would not be a good approach to ULYSSES, and most people who like the book would say that the different parts of the book support each other, provide contrast, build up intricate cross-reference, etc, and you need all of them in order to make all of them work.

Though the medium is different I think my view of this particular 69LS question would be roughly the same.

As I say, this has all been rehearsed in the past, probably rather better than in this post.