The Magnetic Fields: "Distortion"

As a record suffused with electronic noise and feedback, Distortion stands as a sonic mirror piece to 2004's I, a collection of acoustic and orchestral backed songs that were copiously free of the band's trademark synthesizers.

Unlike I, Distortion is cacophonous, clanging and clattering with tinny Jesus and Mary Chain style overdriven guitars layered on top of each other complemented by thudding muted drums and dully throbbing bass.

A Selective Narrative

If you listen to the album through its best tracks, what you'll hear is the loosely coherent story of a lover, in search of a person at whom they might direct their affections, destroying any competing potential desired objects in their quest.

On "California Girls," Merritt presents a sonic attack against a familiar class of such objects in pop culture. Though the song veers towards the misogynistic in its outright hatred of these privledged girls, it avoids these tricky snares by maintaining a surface approach, skewering instead an idealized false standard of beauty.

Continuing to read the album as a narrative one finds that after suffering rejection at the hands of the other ("Drive On, Driver"), the lover is tormented by their own mind which is suffused with images of the other ("Please Stop Dancing"); a punishment to which the lover responds by purging these visions with alcohol ("Too Drunk to Dream").

Semiotician and fellow deconstructionist of the language of love, Roland Barthes writes of this particular phenomenon of the absent lover and the travails of waiting, "The being I am waiting for is not real...I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg."

The Conclusion

The last quarter of the album features a pair of tracks which explicate the bittersweet revelations that the scorned lover has experienced. On "The Nun's Litany" and "Courtesans," the narrators argue that the only way to navigate the uncertain waters of love and sex is by perpetually wishing for something other than the present life or through objectification.

"The Nun's Litany" is a list of tawdry potential occupations and libidinous other paths the narrator could have taken instead of the cloistered life; the song exhibits Merritt's trademark dissatisfaction with life as it's lived, preferring a track of fantasy and other possibilities.

"Courtesans," on the other hand, argues that if only one could see all sexual desire through the lens of commerce, then hurt and disappointment wouldn't enter into the equation, as the courtesans are ideal conduits of pleasure, blissfully free of emotion and the burden of lovers' meaningless words about permanence.

Uneven, but still Brilliant

On Distortion, The Magnetic Fields' latest release, Merritt hits and misses his targets, spewing candy-coated bile at any takers. Distortion, like I, is an inconsistent affair, however, as several of its songs are little more than castoff throw-away numbers.

Songs like "Three Way" and "Zombie Boy" serve only to bookend the album with tired cliches and trite, unoriginal melodies. Though Merritt is fond of employing such devices if only to send them up in a audio pastiche, here he uses them to little consequential effect.

However, in the album's best moments, Merritt and his band achieve a near-perfect tension between pessimism and pop, balancing the dark, hopeless yearning of the lyrics with the bubbling, distorted synth lines.

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. Vintage: London (2002): 39.

Official Site:

www.houseoftomorrow.com/

Print Article

Email Article

View All Articles

How to subscribe to feeds