Your skin has turned blue and your hair has turned white, must be the voodoo…
I’m sure it was some martini-soaked evening with Stephin Merritt lying in a barcalounger listening to Loveless in some profound stupor that the idea of Distortion hit him. The album is not far removed from other Magnetic Fields albums – the same elegantly phrased lyrics about damaged love, self-abasing, morose humour and chiming, classic pop arrangements with contrasting vocals from the acidic Stephin himself and the sweeter accompaniment of Shirley and Claudia. It is an album of those songs washed over with a sheen of noise, feedback, and distortion. A Magnetic Fields album where the neighbours were making a great big racket while they recorded it. A Magnetic Fields album with a selection of samples from Merzbow and Metal Machine Music playing in the background.
I can’t really imagine why anyone would be put off by this concept, since anyone listening to Magnetic Fields should by virtue of Stephin’s vocal style be prepared for at least a spoonful of cognitive dissonance. The songs hardly drown in the new sonic environment, it merely plays as a background element, a bleary, up-ended version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound technique. Right out of the gates there’s “Three-Way” with a catchy piano part and an engaging 60s-pop style guitar part surrounded with a halo of feedback, sounding like it all got recorded in a speeding steel tube. Maybe that’s not appealing to everyone, but it sure got my attention. John Woo is strangling the guitar like he’s Lou Reed, but this is absolutely a pop song. It’s a really fascinating concept, writing a perfect pop ditty with typically Merritt barbed-wire lyrics then matching the overall recording aura to the lacerating words. On a prior Magnetic Fields album, Claudia Gonson sweetly singing ‘Don’t make me cut you’ or ‘They will hear me say as the pavement curls, I hate California girls’ would have been cutesy, here you feel a bit more of the bared teeth, the threat explicit. Not that Merritt doesn’t have his typically brilliant stings, such as the description of said California girls as ‘faux folk sans derrieres.’
I mean, hell, Stephin Merritt has done romance. The last Magnetic Fields album felt a bit like he was treading water, because he’d already made a pretty definitive statement on the whole love and romance thing. So now that the book has been written, it’s time to burn it and throw the ashes to the wind. That’s what Distortion is. Pure, cleansing fire. In this environment, Merritt’s own vocals do feel somewhat out of place (or perhaps too much in place), but Claudia and Shirley are perfect. The main thing is just that it’s such an interesting album to listen to, the way everything shimmer and shakes around itself, with practically everything heavily distorted until the beginning of “Too Drunk to Dream” with Stephin extolling the virtues of being shitfaced over being sober. The guitars have this great, jagged, menacing sound to them and the piano parts convey a sensation like the too-bright of the world when you’re hungover. It’s an album that just seems surly and aggravated, like all it wants to say is ‘I don’t need to fucking entertain you people. This is for me, dammit.’ There are songs about having a zombie sex slave and about a nun wanting to become a whore. What’s not to love?
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