It's a crime that one of the greatest Christmas
songs in recent memory is being released in January. "Mr. Mistletoe," the fifth
track on The Magnetic Fields' new full-length, Distortion, is mastermind Stephin
Merritt's addition to the loveless-on-Yuletide canon, and it waltzes through
washes of frosty fizz and curdled couplets like "Oh, Mr. Mistletoe, wither and
die / you useless weed / for no one have I." As always, Merritt's scheming
rhymes and Nyquil-clogged voice lend body to the froth of his high-concept pop.
But eight albums in, the songwriter has cooked up a singularly arch ambition:
"to sound more like The Jesus And Mary Chain than The Jesus And Mary Chain." In
that task, Merritt utterly fails. But that doesn't make Distortion any less brilliant.
Merritt, as the disc's title implies, has chased
the J&MC; dream by steeping everything in torrents of distortion. "Zombie
Boy," the album's token new-wave song, sounds like Ultravox wrung through
cheesecloth, and "Drive On, Driver" is just one of Shirley Simms' acidly sweet,
static-scarred contributions. But Distortion's racket is a muted,
gentle one. Feedback—and there's a ton of it—twinkles rather than
stabs, and Merritt's melodies and arrangements are far more supple and pliant
than anything the Reid Brothers ever produced. In fact, the album edges closer
to J&MC;'s peers on Creation Records in the late '80s, bands like Felt and
The Pastels, which mixed deadpan angst with immaculate mutations of classic
songcraft. Of course, Merritt has always been that era's torchbearer, and
that's why Distortion winds up being far less of a departure than Merritt may have
intended. The songs themselves are as lush and prickly as anything Merritt's
ever made—who can resist the lines "Sober, life is a prison / Shitfaced,
it is a blessing"? Christmas came very early this year.