“Are you ready to rock?” asked Stephin Merritt in a monotone deadpan, opening Tuesday night’s Magnetic Fields show at the Paramount Theatre perched portly atop a stool far stage right. The quintet was, of course, anything other than rocking, despite the fuzzed out barrage that laces their latest album, Distortion. Instead, the night was a mixture of the poignant and frivolous, the group seeming to enjoy themselves immensely in having yet another expectation to overturn and Merritt delighting in derailing the banter of pianist Claudia Gonson, who played primary host. Over an impressively full two-and-a-half hours, Merritt and Co. toured through various touchstones of his catalogue, including healthy turns into the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and even “What a Fucking Lovely Day!” from his Chinese opera The Orphan of Zhao.
Opening with the 6ths’ “When I’m Out of Town” and caustic “No One Will Ever Love You” from 69 Love Songs, Merritt’s sanguine croon atop his bouzouki was balanced by the equally prevalent lead vocals of Gonson and Shirley Simms. The light and playful tone was set early, however, with the Lemony Snicket-inspired Gothic Archies tune “Walking My Gargoyle” and hilarious new “California Girls,” stripped of Distortion’s electric guitar and reverb and recast with TV theme song lilt. Likewise, the wickedly twisted perversion of “The Nun’s Litany” was countered by the more sincere melancholy of “All My Little Words” and “Old Fools.”
Merritt at his best manages to set his anchor of depression and disillusion in a harbor of levity, making songs like “This Little Ukulele” simultaneously amusing and intensely mournful, undercutting sentimentality with absurdist torch songs like “All Dressed Up in Dreams” and “Yeah! Oh Yeah!” and forays into the overtly comic the lurch of “Zombie Boy.” The quintet closed out the first set spectacularly, though, with 69 Love Songs‘ “Papa Was a Rodeo” done as a beautiful, bizarre country duet.
The second set opened equally eclectic, moving from the cascading “Take Ecstasy With Me” to the disconsolate “Courtesans” to the Gothic Archies’ “Crows.” “Too Drunk to Dream” became a rousing sing-along, though some of the other new songs did not translate as well into the more stripped down arrangements, especially “Drive On Driver” and the encore’s “Three-Way,” which awkwardly traded its surf rock licks for an almost jazzy gloss.
Between two thorough sets and a three-song encore, there was little left untouched. Perhaps most impressive, and amusing, was how deftly the band balanced the shifts from playful to downright depressing, Gonson the extroverted foil to Merritt’s wry stoicism. It’s a juxtaposition that would seem almost painfully askew, but over the past 15 years the band has developed a convincing chemistry and that was on full display Tuesday night.
This article appears in October 17 • 2008.
