After the Magnetic Fields' 1999 magnum opus
69 Love Songs,
Stephin Merritt gave up on synthesizers. His early work, beginning with 1991's
Distant Plastic Trees,
used inexpensive synthesizers and drum machines almost exclusively as the bedrock for Merritt's droll songs and Susan Anway's unaffected vocals.
As the decade wore on, Anway left, Merritt sang more and gathered a steady group of bandmates who added chamber-pop-style cello, piano, and guitar to his increasingly sophisticated writing.
When the Magnetic Fields finally followed up 69 Love Songs with 2004's i, the credits pointedly proclaimed "no synths," and that maxim held for the subsequent albums, Distortion and Realism. But the new Love at the Bottom of the Sea is, in Merritt's words, "our triumphant return to synthesizers."
"I was bored with the technology," says Merritt from his New York apartment. "I felt like the technology had stagnated, and I wanted to take a break from it. So we did a trilogy, and I waited for the technology to change. And it has."
But the new album isn't a return to the Fields' early synth pop style: Merritt uses mainly electronics that oscillate or distort tones. He's enamored with the possibilities for chance or inexact sounds, and they're sometimes used to disrupt the tight perfection of the album's brief, funny songs.
"I don't feel like I'm going back to my roots in any way, except that the synthesizer was the first instrument that I played well," Merritt says. "On this record, I'm not really playing the synthesizers as keyboard instruments at all. In fact, I don't think I actually used any keyboards in the sense of playing with more than one finger."
Love at the Bottom of the Sea is dense with whooshing and whining and squelching electronics - and other novel sounds, such as the electric kazoo Merritt plays on "The Horrible Party" - and they add to the album's humor and delight. Merritt's long been celebrated for his wit, but this is his most straightforwardly comic album. Most of these 2- to 21/2-minute songs depict love gone awry in overtly comic terms, voiced by, among others, two jealous murderers, four hopeless romantics infatuated with a variety of inaccessible loves, one conflicted nymphomaniac and one abstinent young woman.
Merritt denies the album has a theme, however, and claims the songs' witty brevity is coincidental.
"All the songs happen to be short, but, you know, so am I," he deadpans.
The no-synths rule returns when the Fields come to Union Transfer Wednesday. Merritt will play harmonium, melodica, and kazoo and be joined by Shirley Simms (ukulele and vocals), Claudia Gonson (piano and vocals), Sam Davol (cello), and John Woo (guitar and banjo).
"We never pay attention to what the record sounds like when we do our live show," Merritt says. "The album probably has more in common with Irving Berlin than it does with Kraftwerk, which I guess means it has a lot in common with Taco, who covered Irving Berlin in the style of Kraftwerk."