Why should it be that my response to one recent Stephin Merritt project is tepid while I feel distinctly warm about this one? It may be, as before, a bit of a footnote, but I think the variety of voices and instrumentation give this album an extra lift.
Stephin was on Private Passions on Radio 3 last year, and very much at home talking almost exclusively about unusual musical instruments (plus how Sondheim is second only to Shakespeare as a lyricist). Which raises the possibility that albums like this may turn out, with hindsight, not to be footnotes but to be the mainstream of Stephin's work from now on.
Here's what I wrote to Stephinsongs last April:
I've only listened to it two and half times, but I have a feeling it's going to grow on me. I already like it more than I like Wasps Nests or Memories of Love. Favourite songs so far include The Little Maiden of the Sea, The Little Hebrew Girl, The Collar and the Garter, The Ugly Little Duck and The World Is Not Made of Flowers. Please don't flame me if you're a big fan of Wasps Nests etc - can we just agree to differ?Ernest, I think you're right that the vocals are going to be critical to many people liking or not liking this album. But I think it also goes deeper than that. I think Showtunes is the latest step in Stephin moving away from the indie-rock genre, and fans that came to him as part of the indie scene (i.e. where most of the Wasps Nests singers came from) are probably, and understandably, losing patience. I only joined up via 69LS and Hyacinths and Thistles, so this is easier for me to take. In fact, some of the vocals sound (to me) quite similar to Odetta's on Hyacinths and Thistles.
It's going to be interesting to see where Stephin goes after this and the Gothic Archies/Lemony Snicket album (which also has him writing songs 'to order' to align with someone else's story). When Eno first went ambient, a lot of his fans must have thought WTF?! And when Neil Young did synth/vocoder rock followed by rockabilly, he definitely alienated a lot of his fans. But twenty years of hindsight on those shifts, people are more indulgent and see them in a different perspective. Changes of direction seem, at worst, endearingly eccentric and, at best, bold and visionary.
Perhaps Stephin is going to slip the moorings of convention and make pop/rock music that doesn't belong to the traditions of either solo artists or rock bands.
Finally, one drawback with Showtunes for me is that it sounds like a compilation album, and makes me want to hear the songs from each of the three shows in context with the other material from those shows. Has anyone got the downloads for the full shows yet? Is there a good online store to get them from that has a good sample rate but doesn't have crappy DRM?
(The answer to those questions so far appears to be no.)
No one flamed me, but others were less upbeat. Alistair Fitchett said it was his least favourite Stephin Merritt album by some distance, and went on, "I applaud the idea of deviating from the course of rock'n'roll (or indeed Pop) orthodoxy, but i just dont find this deviation in any way interesting."
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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