Customer Reviews

Wayward Bus & Distant Plastic Trees

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is my favourite of all the Magnetic Fields releases to date. It contains their first album 'Distant Plastic Trees' (minus one track - 'Plant White Roses'). It's is a strange and beautiful record full of songs that use unusual structures and orchestrations ('Babies Falliing' is little more than a folk song sung over sounds of trickling and noise, 'Living In An Abandoned Firehouse with You' uses warm atmospheric electronics and a great melody, 'Kings' is again a seemingly unstructured piece with a bizzare melody and odd backing track). On this CD all tracks are sung by Susan Anway who negotiates herself like a zombie through Stephin Merritt's lyrical word play and electronic musical mazes. The effect is stunning and not distancing as it may at first sound. Lurking amongst the obscurities is the alterna-hit '100'000 Fireflies' which sounds positively conventional in this setting.

The rest of the CD (the first 10 tracks) are made up of The Wayward Bus songs which were recorded after the Distant Plastic Trees tracks. . Susan Anway is again your vocalist de jour and these songs are great in an entirely different way. There's a Phil Spector-ish vibe filtered through the Merritt lo-fi home recording system on songs like "When You Were My Baby" and "The Saddest Story Ever Told". There's the odd stinker ('Tokyo A Go Go' anyone?) but so many moments of divinity ('Candy', 'Jeremy', 'Like Lovers From the Moon') easily outweigh this. Track 11 is 4 and a half mintues of silence that separate the two sections of the CD - Why? Who knows, just chalk it up as one of the mysteries of the Magnetic Fields.

I can take or leave some of the later efforts such as the 69 Love Songs extravaganza, but The Wayward Bus is a CD I constantly revisit.

PS: Oh and can I just add how nice it is to again see the attractive artwork of Wendy Smith on the cover (she did the cover art for the band, Weekend, in the 1980's).

I usually detest indie pop like this: low fi, precious, sentimentally gloopy songs with detached singing and little or no guts to the music. But damn if this doesn't work in an odd, magical way. The songs don't rock for sure, but the melodies and lyrics pack a delicate punch that can be either soothing, cathartic or just bittersweet. Songs for after the breakup with the love of your life.

Okay, so first I want to note the strange ordering of this album. This is actually told old albums that were recently put together on one CD to be re-released by Merge Records. That's good for people like me because it's makes for one less CD to have to buy. But they put the Wayward Bus album before Distant Plastic Trees, even though Trees was released in 1989 and the Bus was released in 1991. If this was in chronological order, they would be reversed. And that would help a lot because there's a significant difference in the sound between the two albums. So that's how I'm going to do this review, the opposite of the way Merge wanted it.

So I guess Distant Plastic Trees was the first glimpse the world had of the Magnetic Fields. Even though they were New Wave and they were synthpop, the sound doesn't strike you that way at all. There's a lot of opposing forces going on here. Stephin Merritt, *the* Magnetic Field, has a penchant for love songs, and not just love songs but ones that sound like they could have been written 70 years ago, although they do have a lot of strange twists. So in a sense, almost every Magnetic Fields song has an antique feel to it lyrically. The music is mostly programmed on keyboards and other synthesizers, but they don't sound like anything else. Merritt likes using noisy machines, comforting music being played on beat up old things that are past their prime. So the music sounds like it's striving for perfection, but it just sounds rather messy, here on the first album more than any other. And there you have the charm of the Magnetic Fields.

All of the songs on this double album were sung by Susan Anway who has a classic and clean delivery juxtaposed against all the machinery around her. On the later albums, Merritt started singing the songs himself and the cocktail drummer on this album, Claudia Gonson, of all people, started singing many of the songs too. But here it's all Susan and that gives the album on a whole a consistency that none of the later releases have.

Don't misunderstand me about the sound of the album either. The sound may be messy, but the melodies come through loud and clear and I don't think you could find many catchier songs than "You Love To Fail." There are times though, like in "Babies Falling" with its bubbly noise and seemingly random wind chimes sounds, that's it's hard to find the rhythm that Anway is actually singing to. It's atmospheric in a psychedelic tape machine way. And then of course there's "100,000 Fireflies," something every indie kid wants to put on a mixtape for his girlfriend.

*fastforward two years!!* And here we are, back in the Greenwich Village where Stephin Merritt has finished The Wayward Bus. This one is a lot more conventional than Distant Plastic Trees. It's less noisy and random and more melodic on the whole. Add to the mix of synthesizers. a tuba, horns and cello and you can see how the Fields are evolving. Everyone should get to hear "When You Were My Baby" and "The Saddest Story Ever Told" because they're two of the most delicious examples of pop music that doesn't date itself.

I won't go into what everyone has already said about Stephen Merritt and who he is and all, but I WILL say that Merritt's 'poor production' on this album was intentional. It gives the album a warm, personal feel, which would be totally destroyed if the electric instruments were left in their pure, harsh forms. He processes and reprocesses them until they are rough, the dead opposite of the intent behind the instruments themselves. As a result, they are friendly to us.

The female vocals are representative of what one can expect to find in 'indie' music... they don't have the melodramatic passion of what is expected from mainstream music, but the almost monotone, unwavering voice on this album complements the electronic nature of it. She sings slong, not sings over the music. As a result, we have a beautiful and unexpected merging of human and machine.

And who can say no to heavy experimentation? That is the only way that anything new ever happens. No, don't start your Merritt collection with this album, but don't discount it. Come back to it later, listen to it in the background, and it will grow attached to you inseperably.

This album snuck up on me. At first I thought it was terrible, for the reasons other reviewers have mentioned (blandish vocals, messy arrangements and noise) but I listened to it a little more and got to know the songs and appreciate all of them. The quirky poetry and the entire mood the album creates has come to mean so much to me, and it has truly become one of my favorite albums- odd, imperfect, and endearing.

Susan was hired for these two albums to sing in the manner which Stephin wanted her to sing. It's no accident that she sang on some of the tracks, in what has been termed "bland" "monotone" etc.This is the effect Stephin wanted so this is exactly how Susan sang the songs, under Stephin's explicit direction. Susan has an amazing vocal range. If you doubt this just listen to some of her early art/punk "V;" work. As I said, her vocal range is amazing.

This is a pretty pair of albums, and well worth your yen or dollar. Let's say that Phil Spector and a sad Abba and independent production got jumbled up in a more often than not melancholy and nostalgic mood, and in a lost and lonely bedsit universe it touched hearts and went to number one after everyone bought a copy to take home. I think you'll have something like this Magnetic Fields collection. You could yearn a little to these sounds.

The first two Magnetic Fields albums featured singer Susan Anway, who possesses a beautiful, haunting voice that gives Stephin Merritt's very pointed lyrics a softer touch. There are many outstanding tracks, and they're very fresh. If you're a fan of Merritt's singing, you may not like these albums, but if you're like me and appreciate Merritt's songwriting brilliance but find his assumption of lead vocal duties a mistake, this is the best of both worlds: excellent songs performed by a talented singer.

I know many people love Merritt's vocals and I don't mean to offend those people. It's all a matter of taste, and while I love his songwriting I don't care for his voice.

It never occured to me that The Magnetic Fields had much else of immediate worth in their catalog other than 69 Love Songs until I was recommended this collection of two small albums. One of the reasons that 69 Love Songs was so amazing was that it covered lots of completely unique styles, the most notable of which is fragile ukulele driven folk ballads, but what people sometimes forget is that some of the best songs on 69LS are the more traditional, less ambitious ones. Traveling back in time almost ten years interestingly enough doesn't do much to deter the staggering pop sensibility of Stephin Merritt. For the most part, these songs are finely crafted pop of typical structure with a completely unique style. And also interesting is the fact that they have aged fairly well even in the face of the bands later, more revered work.

What will strike fans first is that these albums are the bands first try. The rate of success in these songs is so consistent it is almost unbelievable. These songs are all lovely, quaint little love songs that have predictable but ultimately enjoyable melodies and hooks. A lot of what makes The Fields' later work more enjoyable is how lightly challenging it is. But most of these songs are easy vocabulary for pop fans immediately recognizable. This makes the experience all the more immediate but that much less precious as far as lasting impact goes. The songs are very hummable and lovely, and the hooks are unique to each song and surprisingly all very great. And the amount of material there is here on this collection is very nice, and makes for a feast to the kind of music fans who enjoy these kinds of songs. the mood ranges from lovely and happy to almost tragically bittersweet.

But the more distinctive aspect of the records are what they sound like production wise. Most of these songs consist of simple synthesizers, that in some ways sound completely artificial while the melodies themselves "keep it real" so to say. This mixed with the fact that a lot of the songs simply sound like lovely little rural songs makes for a juxtaposition that sounds odd in words but surprisingly works in the music. The covers of these two albums depict a lovely scribbled suburbia that this style depicts well. The band also experiments with exotic instruments at times and creates atmospheres that can be likened to tropical islands or far eastern villages. Another difference in all this music that fans who have worked backwards will find interesting is the vocals. All of these vocals are done by Susan Anway, who has a very gentle sweeping voice that works very well for all of these romantic lyrics. As usual, the lyrics are completely superb. In fact, one of the greatest aspects about The Magnetic Fields music is how embossed the lyrics feel. New fans to the Magnetic Fields often cite the lyrics as one of the first things that pop out, and for sure, Stephin Merritt is an unbelievable lyricist who creates poetry that syncs perfectly with the music. Specific poetic standouts turn up in pretty much every song, and personal favorites are not few. I suppose a few really great ones are 100,000 Fireflies, Summer Lies, and Lovers From The Moon.

But in general, the consistency of the record is quite impressive. There are a couple of throwaways, but out of twenty one songs, a good fifteen of them are really strong. The differences between Distant Plastic Trees and The Wayward Bus lie mostly in the instrumentation, specifically the fact that cello and horns were introduced to The Wayward Bus. The addition of the cello proved to be a wonderful move that would positively impact the band for the rest of their career. The cello is a beautiful, sweeping instrument that works wonders over the bass, and serves up brilliant harmonies when it is present. Favorite songs of mine are When You Were My Baby, Lovers From The Moon, and Tar Heel Boy. In the end, this collection compiles two already good albums onto one disk and has many truly wonderful songs on it. As a purchase, this is simply awesome.

I first heard Magnetic Fields through their albums Holiday and i. I was so used to Stephin Merritt's inimitable voice and melancholic songs that when I first heard The Wayward Bus/Distant Plastic Trees with Susan Anway as lead singer and songs that jumped all over the map regarding instrumentation and were generally less moody, I'd've sworn it was a totally different band. However, I loved what I heard. I have trouble teasing a theme from the album, but every song stands on its own, and there's always one song to suit whatever your mood is. It makes great music to accompany summer too. (I'm thinking of "Summer Lies," "Old Orchard Beach," and "Suddenly There Is a Tidal Wave." This is indie music at its best, and I can't think of another band with which to compare "this" Magnetic Fields. Just listen and decide!