Steeped in migraine-inducing feedback, Magnetic Fields’ last album, Distortion, was an exercise in bloody-minded asceticism. Two years on, band leader Stephin Merritt puts the weirdness on hold for a record that cleaves to the bittersweet goth-folk (with the emphasis, as always, on the ‘bitter’) of 2004’s i and his sprawling ‘90s masterpiece 69 Love Songs. The best bits stick rigorously to the established Magnetic Fields formula, with Merritt’s hangdog croon sharing the floor with minimalist chamber pop – indeed opener ‘You Must Be Out of Your Mind’ is such an archetypal Magnetic Fields track it could be a 69 Love Songs outtake.
There’s a hilariously misjudged moment soon afterwards, however, in the shape of ‘We Are Having a Hootenanny’, which, one gathers, is Merritt’s attempt at writing a tankard-clinking party tune. What’s lacking throughout are the fuzzy electronics that defined Merritt’s early work – he has described the record as the third in a trilogy of “no-synths” LPs (after Distortion and i) and only one track, the ‘Dada Polka’, has an electric guitar. Frankly, we can wait to hear him plug in again.
Key track: ‘You Must Be Out Of Your Mind’