Despite the laughably appropriate indie filmmaker penchant for Stephin Merritt's music, all of his songs incorporated into movie soundtracks thus far have been fairly unconvincing. Anyone who remembers the Ashley Judd Oscar bid, Someone Like You, knows both that a wristwatch will disappear if you unflinchingly stare at it for more than an hour in a dark theatre, and that 69 Love Songs' "Absolutely Cuckoo" didn't exactly fit into the proceedings. Fighting back the inclination to blame all our pop music woes on the Judd family yet again, the incompatibility of Merritt and the movies is probably the electro-troubadour's own fault: his music is just too witty, too perceptive, and too memorable to make any sense in another medium. Still, if someone put a Howitzer to an ambitious filmmaker's head and told them to make some sort of Merritt vehicle (trust me, this happens all the time if you stay out too late on 4th Street in Downtown L.A.), the only satisfactory result would have to be about frigid undergraduates seducing wintry laundromat workers in libraries.
It was with weary eyes, then, that the world received Merritt's first album-length soundtrack for 2002's ode to statutory rape, Eban & Charley. The franchise was underwhelming to say the least, the only similarity between the album and the movie being that shy, barrette-fastened teenagers bought them for birthday presents to seem controversially sophisticated. Now, because Merritt is eminently, eccentrically charismatic (and because 90 percent of his career output has been worthwhile), we're willing to give him another chance-- particularly because the film he's scoring stars a pseudo-post-goth, emotionally fragile Katie Holmes reconciling with a dope-smoking cancer victim.
Though it's as close to a perfect setting as the music could get, the actual movie didn't give much presence to these songs (excepting the one written specifically for it). Regardless, Pieces of April stacks four new Magnetic Fields songs (none of which were even in the movie), one new Merritt song, and five previously released Magnetic Fields/6ths songs on one shorter-than-the-movie's-theatrical-run 27-minute CD. The new Magnetic Fields songs will, thankfully, not raise any eyebrows; the enthusiasm and sparkling spontaneity is, like always, pressed into ukuleles and tucked into preposterously addictive Yamaha sound settings circa 1985.
"Dreams Anymore" has the sort of lambent whimsy-chimes that accompany all good dream sequences while the lyrics and the ever-imperious harmonium solo do everything in their power to disown that image "'cause she don't believe in dreams anymore." "Stray with Me" is not nearly as engrossing: it proves you can add however much cello you want to a song and it can still sound like a bad Eels B-side with a Jimmy Buffett bassline and lyrics worse than the titular pun. Merritt's "One April Day", the only song specifically commissioned for the movie (and given any substantial screen time) is quiet, pleasant, ignorable, and full of sparse mandolin and light tambourine. Needless to say, it sounds like a soundtrack when the cardinal rule of a good soundtrack is to do whatever's necessary to make sure the album doesn't just sound like a soundtrack.
With that in mind, the other two additions are easy to savor, particularly in contrast. "Heather Heather" begrimes Merritt's music box effects and has some genuinely arresting lines: "We belong together/ Like sex and violence/ Like death and silence." Strangely, it gets progressively more rocksteady in the last 30 seconds, which is either brilliant or incoherent depending on your intelligence. There's also one song that fills enough criteria to clearly announce its candidacy for "great song" status: "All I Want to Know" has the usual slender drums, bells and synths, but the chorus, built off of an erratically simmering uke solo, is an expanding pop incline performed with just the right vocal histrionics, while the lyrics are as knowingly torn between irony and sincerity as anything Merritt's ever recorded: "Is there nothing nohow left to save?/ Tell me tonight or not at all/ We'll have to fight/ I can make last call, and play a little pinball."
Even if it's not in your Top 10, it smashes the smattering of 6ths tunes on here, all from the unresponsively received and unresponsively performed 2000 album, Hyacinths and Thistles. The Momus collaboration, "As You Turn to Go", is lethargic, tedious and haphazardly instrumented. It should be the perfect place to highlight the lyrics (or at least it would be if they weren't so uncharacteristically vapid and painstakingly grumbled). Luckily, the remaining are all "First Song on Your 1999 Mix Tape" cuts from 69 Love Songs: the barbershop-enunciated reverent country-rock clomp, "Epitaph for My Heart"; the trotting, giddily reflexive "I Think I Need a New Heart"; and the flopping, carnivalesque chorus of "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side".
Any Merritt fan worth their daintily-held white burgundy probably owns five of the ten songs on here. When we use calculus, we find that this means the average Merritt fan will be spending upwards of $11 on thirteen minutes of new music. That's about $1.20 a minute, and unless you're receiving aural, intellectual and physical pleasure during that period, that's just too much. If, on the other hand, you saw the movie, decided the music held some promise (or just find the movie so remarkable you need to constantly evoke it) and wanted a quick sampler, this is a cautious buy/download on your way to the Magnetic Fields full-length that's supposed to be released later this year.
