Interesting that this should crop up now, just as we're 'anticipating' the new Magnetic Fields album, Distortion
, which sounds closest in style to this 1993 album. I say anticipating because — and this is a first for me — I have actually downloaded an illicit leaked copy of Distortion and have listened to it a couple of times. It's dividing opinion among fans on the Stephinsongs mailing list, with my friend Mark leading the camp that doesn't like it at all. I'm not optimistic myself, but I'm going to give it another month or two before I make up my mind.
Mark likes Holiday, and I know it's a favourite with many fans, though I've always struggled with it. As with The Charm of the Highway Strip (which I got the same day in 2000 as I got this) I realised that, if I had heard one of these tracks by my new favourite band on the radio at the time when Holiday was released, I would almost certainly have ignored and forgotten it. Who knows: perhaps that actually happened?
What I struggle with is the almost (ahem) Brechtian production, which decreases the separation between instruments and blurs Stephin's vocals so that you don't get much of their grain. I think I read somewhere that he actually created much of his music around this time using Band-in-a-Box software, which gives the beats that automaton consistency, but somehow lacking the feel of the best exponents of that sound like The Model or Soft Cell's Tainted Love.
The lyrics, too, are elliptical — little glimpses and sketches of ideas rather than being fully realised. Which can work well with some artists, like, say, Laurie Anderson, but to my mind Stephin's more explicit lyrics of the last decade or so are more fun and engaging. Also, in recent years it has become quite rare for him to use choruses in his writing, while all but one of the songs on Holiday do have choruses. The exception to this, Sad Little Moon, also has a clear cello part and no synthesised drums, making it more accessible to my ear.
I don't know. I hate those last two paragraphs. They don't add up to anything. Sometimes I just can't make any sense of music. Do you ever get that? I can only meet it with a bemused shrug.
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