Music Arcades: Quasi: Featuring "Birds"

Some purchases are just mistakes. As the ripples from the summer of 2000 started to diminish, I had a voracious appetite for things I hadn't heard/seen/read before. I felt this boundless enthusiasm for everything — how distant that seems now! It was exciting but also led to impulsive and injudicious spending.

I ordered this CD on the strength of something I read on the web comparing the approach of this album to Stephin Merritt's. I can't be sure, but I think it was in something like The Village Voice, and may even have been this feature.

I can't see the similarity, but then I don't think of Stephin as "indie rock" at all, which I know is a kind of heresy in America, and ignores the fact that The Magnetic Fields played the indie rock circuit, and were played on college radio, in the nineties. But I wasn't a fan then and that's not how I got to know them. So there.