The Magnetic Fields Distortion WB rating out of 100

sThe title of The Magnetic Fields’ eighth long-player, Distortion, is possibly the most accurate descriptor ever bestowed on a piece of music. It’s likely that frontman and sometime vocalist Stephin Merritt wore out any number of overdrive pedals during the album’s production; so drenched in fuzzy guitar noise is it that one could be forgiven for believing he would be credited as having played chainsaw in the liner notes. However, instrumental affectations aside, Merritt’s unabashed love of sunny ‘60s pop remains undiminished, and Distortion comes across sounding like the bastard lovechild of The Beach Boys, The Ronettes and Eddie Van Halen.

However bizarre this hybrid may sound, it bears remembering that Distortion is, above all else, a pop record – remove the feedback and reverb, and ‘Xavier Says’ becomes a vintage girl-group number, albeit a slothfully-paced one. And in the spirit of all great pop music, The Magnetic Fields keep things remarkably brief. When down-tempo numbers like ‘Mr Mistletoe’ wrap up in under three minutes, it draws attention to the brief runtime of the record. 13 songs in just under 39 minutes, with nothing running over 3.07 and under 2.42, things are kept routinely tight. In this sense, the album is most reminiscent of Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet, taking what should be top-40 pop songs and twisting them out of shape through sheer volume and instrumentation. Perhaps this, then, is the distortion of the title.

Vocal duties are shared, heightening the feeling of a Wilson brothers-style stage presence, although harmonies are shelved throughout. The use of reverb by Merritt is the closest to this, and the Beach Boys connection is never more apparent than on the a capella introduction to ‘Too Drunk to Dream’, which, sans vocal harmonies, recalls Dennis at his best. And while the lyrics – “Sober, life is a prison/Shitfaced, it is a blessing” may be in keeping with the behind-the-scenes Beach Boys, the sentiment – “I gotta get too drunk to dream/Because I only dream of you” is very much a product of their public persona. While it is an exercise in futility to list every influence that The Magnetic Fields have absorbed over the course of their 17-odd years, there is more than a little My Bloody Valentine about Distortion, not least the distortion itself. The willful subversion of the pop ethos has been done before, but to invoke the godparents of doom-laden grunge is one of the most extreme examples.

The contradiction throughout all of these comparisons and golden days nostalgia is that, while curiously poppy in its implementation, Distortion is a morbidly depressed record, perhaps justifying the conceit of the My Bloody Valentine referencing. Whomsoever we believe to be the closest reference point, Merritt’s themes and obsessions are his own – the album seemingly revolving around his mourning of the loss of a special someone.

From the self-loathing of ‘Too Drunk to Dream’ to ‘I’ll Dream Alone’ and its abject misery to the closing, viciously bitter ‘Courtesans’ (“Well courtesans shed no tears/When you leave them high and dry/They just go on/To the next guy”) the track listing reads like a self-therapy session wrapped in a particularly pretty bow – one that should be taken to with a particularly shaky pair of scissors. With this in mind, all the benchmarks seem limited as a summary of Distortion. Its sentiment is closer to a condensation of the past 20 years of popular indie music than the girls, car and surf facade of the ‘60s heyday; in Distortion the undercurrents of pain linger long after the pleasantries and faux smiles have faded.