Friday, July 14, 2006

69 Things to Love...

As some of you might know, I'm infatuated with the music of Beirut. So, in another fit of listening to his excellent Gulag Orkestar, I found myself reading at his myspace page. While engaging in this ultimate in dorky fan activities, I happened to notice that he lists one of his favorite bands and influences as being Magnetic Feilds.

Now, Magnetic Fields, and its frontman Stephin Merritt, are something that I'm roughly familar because of the fact that both names are dropped frequently on sources like KEXP and Pitchforkmedia.com. But, to date, I've never really bothered looking into their music. So, I figured today would be a good day to change that.

A little research told me that Magnetic Fields had released a three disk mega-album called 69 Love Songs. Literally three disks with a total of 69 songs... all the topic of love. What's not to love, if you're a music fan with and eight hour work shift to burn? So, I figured I'd ambitiously set out to listen to all of it today.

And I love it!



Now, love's a pretty big topic to tackle. And 69 songs prove to be a lot of tracks to cover it with (honestly, I'm only now starting the third of the three volumes). And, to be fair, there are missteps and times where the songs are more fragments than fully realized pieces. But, in keeping with the theme of love, these stumbles and mumbles only add to the overall strength of the work. Because, what you have is an exploration of love in all its form: Flirty. Sexy. Forlorn. Lost. Intense. Playful. Desperate. Lustful. Serene. Alien. Romantic. Long-term. Short-term. Sleazy. Stupid. Happy. Heartfelt. Heck, there's a song called "Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits"... which is about, well, I'm sure you can imagine.

So, literally, if you've ever been in love, I'm pretty sure there is something to love on these three disks. Ambitious and amazing.

Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" Vol. 1-Vol. 2-Vol. 3

"A pretty girl in her underwear, A pretty girl in her underwear, If there's anything better in this world, who cares!" Yeah, good stuff.

2 comments:

generalfan said...

Very cool! I want to check it out. And you broke with your Friday mystery song....

The General said...

Yeah, I was just going to do a Friday mystery song, but ended up enjoying 69 Love Songs so much I needed to ramble about it.

Maybe I'll do a mystery song later this week.