Stephin Merritt is a master ironist, but at this point he's danced between expectation and reality so many times it's easy to get turned around. The Magnetic Fields' 1999 69 Love Songs was a colossal triple album that demonstrated the power of the individual song, an exercise in Tin Pan Alley-style craft and artifice that could generate real emotions. That effort's subsequent "no synths" trilogy tweaked misconceptions about the author's voice (2004's entirely Merritt-sung i), Jesus and Mary Chain-level fuzz (2008's Distortion), and organic folksiness (2010's Realism). Last year's Love at the Bottom of the Sea was a return to synths and longtime label home Merge, but not quite to form.
With Merritt's main gig in a relative slump, it's reasonable to wonder if he's currently subverting assumptions by saving his best material for less-famous projects. In fact, 2011's odds-and-ends collection Obscurities, released under the songwriter's own name, is much more rewarding than the last couple of Magnetic Fields albums. And Merritt's records with the 6ths and the Gothic Archies certainly have their ardent fans. His third album with the Future Bible Heroes, Partygoing, is available either individually or as part of a remastered collection of the synth-pop outfit's back catalogue, so it's tempting to hope that Merritt is once again flouting audience anticipations. Maybe the Magnetic Fields was the lesser project all along, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. Although the Future Bible Heroes' first outing since 2002's uneven Eternal Youth does offer up slightly more catchy melodies and deadpan quotables than Love at the Bottom of the Sea (outside of brilliantly funny "Andrew in Drag" or tenderly furious "Quick!"). The Future Bible Heroes have always combined Merritt's tunes and lyrics with the 80s-minded electronic arrangements of Chris Ewen, a Boston DJ and former keyboardist for Seymour Stein signees Figures on a Beach; Magnetic Fields member Claudia Gonson also adds drolly conversational vocals. The technology was more immediate this time, the process more collaborative-- "We used to be the Smiths and now we're the early Beatles," Merritt told WNYC's Soundcheck-- but the results are largely the same: Partygoing is an oddball record full of moments that ought to make Merritt devotees knowingly nudge their neighbors, but its pleasures are too esoteric and too kitschy to recommend to any poor souls who still haven't heard 1994's wonderful Holiday or The Charm of the Highway Strip.
One irony noted here has been the contrast between Partygoing's title and the bleak themes of its songs, but Merritt knows how to make your head spin: The album's at its best when the death and depravity are actually kinda funny. "Keep Your Children in a Coma" trolls the "Merritt is cranky!" jerks with his wry observation, "Dude, they have to use computers just to sing," but its cheerful send-up of the latest generation's over-parenting lands like a military-grade helicopter. Merritt-led "Sadder Than the Moon", one of a few songs here that touch on aging, yearns gracefully from the perspective of someone in a room filled hoarder-style with books, records, and dolls: "Crazy for you, darling," you come to suspect, is right.
Just as representative of the album, though, are the songs that are tinged with offbeat humor but are also somewhat flawed. "Drink Nothing But Champagne", which ingeniously notes how the bubbly stuff "makes life shorter than drinking water" and will help you "never say no to love," also dips into Momus-like excesses-- see Merritt's super-goofy David Bowie and Aleister Crowley impressions. Meanwhile, how much you chuckle at "How Very Strange", a duet between Merritt and Gonson on an album where one or the other usually takes the lead, seems crucial. Through the dirge-like murk, Gonson remarks on the absurdity of a relationship, while Merritt responds with increasingly ridiculous ways he made the relationship happen ("aphrodysia" leads to "anesthesia" leads to "I put a little heroin ... in everything you took in"). Truly, Rick Ross: U.O.E.N.O.
At other times, though, Partygoing could benefit from a little bit more party. Slow-motion lament of sorts "Satan, Your Way Is a Hard One" is a hard one to stay awake through. Gonson delivers some quintessential Merritt on brief, Shirley Bassey-worthy opener "A Drink Is Just the Thing", but her chipper suicide-pact call on "Let's Go to Sleep (and Never Come Back") is more interesting-- as with so many recent Merritt projects-- in theory than in practice. So, too, with the songs that more topically address recent years' economic inequality, such as the vaguely Eastern-tinged, Merritt-sung "Love Is a Luxury I Can No Longer Afford" and Gonson's pounding, elf-free "Digging My Own Grave" ("What money I shall save!"). At 13 tracks, most three minutes or shorter, it's not a long record, but it often feels that way.
Merritt is fighting ear troubles, so he hasn't been touring with the Future Bible Heroes, which would seem to further diminish expectations-- and thus raise the chances of dramatically exceeding them. In another unpredictable turn, though, Merritt has taken the stage with the ensemble, now and then, to perform a couple of songs on acoustic instruments. One older number in the repertoire is "I'm Lonely (And I Love It)", a 2002 EP track compiled with the past albums on Merge's Memories Of Love, Eternal Youth, And Partygoing. The narrator should be morose, but he's happy; the backing is similarly ebullient. It's a fine song, with a self-aware lyric about "records you'd never let me buy." As with Partygoing, though, I don't love it. And unlike in Merritt's songs, there's no paradoxical twist I can go through that can really make me feel the opposite.
