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THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
He, himself, and i



Stephin Merritt’s voice lies somewhere between what Chet Baker’s would sound like if you played a 45 of "My Funny Valentine" on 33 rpm and Winnie the Pooh’s pal Eeyore. On Saturday, in the first of two appearances at the Berklee Performance Center with the best-known of his several bands, the Magnetic Fields, Merritt crooned as hauntingly as Baker and looked as eternally droopy-eyed and glum as the depressed donkey while strumming mechanically on his ukulele.

The quartet, which Merritt formed 15 years ago in Boston, became a staple object of hero worship among the indie set with the release of the 1999 three-disc tour de force 69 Love Songs (Merge), which defies the clichés of love and its discontents by addressing the perennial subject via almost every conceivable musical genre. Now the Fields have followed it up with i (Nonesuch), on which all 14 songs begin with that self-referential vowel. In the time between, Merritt has recorded with his other, more synthed-out projects, like the 6ths and Future Bible Heroes, the latter of which features Fields pianist and vocalist Claudia Gonson. But his reunion with his original collaborators — John Woo on guitar and banjo, Sam Davol on cello, and Gonson — marks a foray into a more stripped-down homespun realm, where literate lyrics evoke the gorgeous despair of a love letter scribbled on a napkin as dawn casts its first shafts of light and the gin haze evaporates.

The new tunes, many of which were showcased on Saturday, substantiate the comparisons often made between Merritt’s songwriting and that of Cole Porter and Lou Reed. He delights in tricky tangles of internal rhyme and deadpan comic punches. But the reigning force of the Magnetic Fields is irony. How else to explain the appearance of a disco ball for the C&W dirge "Papa Was a Rodeo?" Or the suddenly seductive cooing of Gonson’s less-than-polished vocals? Or her explanation at the show’s outset that because Merritt’s ear was hurting, we would have to snap our fingers throughout the night instead of applauding. We would, she said, "experiment doing what they do in groovy Brazil." "Because it’s beautiful," Merritt added as a monotone footnote.

So with the gentle snapping of a rain-forest sprinkle marking the end of each song, Merritt droned on about heartache, misery, death, and curiosity with his characteristic miscellany. Tunes hopscotched from chamber pieces to Dixieland-kissed ditties to gothic-tinged meditations as Gonson’s piano alternated between lush orchestrations and music-box-esque plinking. The moral of the story they told is that the beauty Merritt pursues can indeed be found in the i of the beholder.

BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Issue Date: May 28 - June 3, 2004
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