"The Book Of Love"

69 Love Songs:

As the album title suggests the theme is "love". This word carries with it a vast array of connotations such as: affection, romance, sex, marriage, happiness, meaning, beauty etc. But also: despair, pain, grief, betrayal, death and manymanymany others. The magic of Magnetic Fields' new album is that it tries to take a peek at all these many facets of the tiny four-letter word. And that it does it so well.

The lyrics are sometimes sweetly funny, sometimes raw or beautiful and sometimes all four rolled into one (as in let's pretend we're bunny rabbits which unites the image of longing with the innocent image of cute rabbits and turns out to be about sex by the truckload).

Most of the time the listener senses an awareness, on the part of Stephen Merritt, of exactly what he is doing and where his texts are going. This awareness is a tremendous plus. It saves the lyrics from becoming soppy and clichéy. It's great to hear a songwriter who actually lives up to the title. Who can actually WRITE. There aren't too many of those around.

Describing the sound, the music, on 69 Love Songs in any detail would take up far too much space as it would require going through each song individually, so this is just gonna be generally skimming the surface. The songs expand over a number of different styles and genres. There are country ballads (eg. papa was a rodeo), rock songs (when my boy walks down the street), Depeche Mode-evoking electropop (promises of eternity) and even a - less successful - attempt at jazz (love is like jazz). Stephen Merritt has selected his music expertly to correspond to whatever face of love he is staring into on that particular track. Merritt plays most instruments himself (the instruments he plays are listed in the cover and take up almost a page of close writing), but also gets some outside help, just as some tracks are sung by guest singers, all brilliant.

My only quarrel with this album is also what makes it stand out as great: That it tries to cover its topic, love, more or less exhaustively. Despite the distinctness of each track and the huge variety on the album as such (pop competitors - eat you hearts out!!!) love songs will be love songs. And putting so many such songs on one album has a tendency to make it a too sentimental affair. Oh well. Everybody's got some sentimental spot somewhere, I suppose, and 69 Love Songs is one of the most brilliant and intelligent ways of conversing this spot that I've ever seen, read or heard.

The greatest quality of 69 Love Songs is, however, none of the above. What really gets my superlatives multiplying is that it is almost inexhaustible. The amount and variety of material is just so vast that you can keep on coming back to it again and again (or simply not leave it, as I didn't for the first week I owned it) and it will still sound fresh every time you press PLAY. Here a word of warning is due. It is possible to buy 69 Love Songs as three separate albums… DON'T! Do not deny yourself the pleasure of coming home with so much new music to get lost in all at one time…