Hard to believe, but we’ve not featured them before…
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Alfred Soto: “The mating calls of sarcastic sharks,” the novelty of the stress landing on the second syllable in “sarcastic” notwithstanding, is strained wit for which Elvis Costello would have congratulated himself in 1994. Naturally the electro-chintz is wan. On the other hand we can’t have too many songs about paying the rent.
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Sally O’Rourke: The most interesting element of the last few Magnetic Fields albums has been the contrast between Shirley Simms’s spirited, folksy vocals and Stephin Merritt’s electronic grinding and droning. (It certainly hasn’t been the songs.) Sometimes the discrepancy is played for a gimmick, but on “Quick!” it amplifies the traces of hurt in Simms’s voice hidden behind her steely sarcasm. “Quick!” is the increasingly rare Magnetic Fields song that evinces real human emotion, and it’s the first in a while to display Merritt’s knack for ambiguity. “You better think of something quick before I don’t love you no more” isn’t the threat of someone on the verge of leaving; it’s last-ditch begging by someone desperate for an excuse to stay. Simms spends the song stalling till she hits on a seemingly critical question: “Who will pay the rent?” It’s the kind of mundane issue that usually gets left out of break-up songs, but here, given her partner’s apparent indifference, it’s the only thing keeping her from being alone. “Quick!” earns its status as a good latter-day Magnetic Fields song less for what it is than for what it represents: that Merritt is still capable of more than just overwritten novelty songs with terrible titles. Hopefully next time around he’ll bring hooks as well.
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Iain Mew: I gather from what I’ve read about Love at the Bottom of the Sea that a lot of people like this one best for doing a bit more than staging clever rhymes over minimal electronic backing. Some of the songs with cleverness to the front (“God Wants Us to Wait,” “All She Cares About is Mariachi”) are the first times that I’ve really loved The Magnetic Fields in eight years, though, and it’s not like this does that much else that well The bitterness comes close to biting but it’s too much of a sketch to quite get there.
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Anthony Easton: I’m a Magnetic Fields fanboy, and really think they have made strong work after 69 Love Songs. It begins with the usual clever work about love that we know them for, and the list song that Merritt pretends to despise. But the line “torture me for my amusement/but who will pay the rent” and then have chorus repeating itself has an economic menace. It seems less of a joke than other work, and someone will correct me, but I think the last of his work that connects social/erotic capital to financial capital in such an explicit way (explicit for Merritt, this isn’t the Maoist musical from 73)
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Jer Fairall: If it is all too tempting to use any new Magnetic Fields track as a stand-in for Merritt and co.’s entire post-69 Love Songs career, it is because everything that the band has done since that now-13-year-old triumph has been uneven in exactly the same ephemeral manner. So, while “Quick!” is not without considerable wit of either the zinger (“like the mating calls of sarcastic sharks”–ha!) or the formal (notice how “beers” is used in a rhyme where “tears” or “years” would have been expected) varieties, what is lacking here is the heart-tugging pathos that underpinned the humour of “Come Back From San Francisco,” “Papa Was a Rodeo” or “Time Enough For Rocking When We’re Old.” The abrupt punchiness of the melody, too, is something that will either charm or annoy depending on one’s mood.
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