Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Do This / Music Smile! Tickets still available for the Magnetic Fields tonight
Posted by Sam Worley on 03.27.12 at 01:29 PM
- alterna2
- Stephin Merritt
Last night they leaned heavily on 69 Love Songs material—“Come Back From San Francisco,” “Reno Dakota,” “Boa Constrictor,” “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off,” and, happily, “The Book of Love” and “Busby Berkeley Dreams.” The first set closed with a song by the Gothic Archies, one of Merritt’s other projects: Merritt, sort of a notorious crank, seemed to be making fun of his own tendency toward the dark and fucked-up by ending with “Smile! No One Cares How You Feel,” a song whose closing line is “Everyone you despise will die, so smile.” Earlier in the show there were a couple songs from the Magnetic Fields’ most recent album, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, but for me the standout was an oldie: “Plant White Roses,” a devastating country lament with a chorus in perfect three-part harmony. One of the great unsurprising pleasures of the Magnetic Fields is that whatever odd and/or almost-too-precious things they get up to musically—not even to say lyrically—the band can also effortlessly turn out a song in the most traditional of forms and totally slay it. I was thrilled when Gonson mentioned that Kelly Hogan will cover the song on her forthcoming album, I Like to Keep Myself in Pain; Hogan opens for the band tonight.
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