n all likelihood 69 Love Songs will stand as The Magnetic Fields (and Stephen Merritt's) defining statement. Which is honestly too bad: as many good songs as it might contain (and it's less than most critics would have you believe), it's a sprawling mess, fraught with filler and poorly thought out gimmicks, a whole that in no sense lives up to the sum of it's many, many parts.


It's not as though Merritt doesn't have talent: the few fully developed songs present ("All My Little Words", "If You Don't Cry", "I Don't Want to Get Over You") are breathtaking. He would be better served, however, focusing his craft, especially lyrically. The album has a recurring habit of taking a perfectly beautiful song and then marring it with phrases like "cute little bum" ("Acoustic Guitar"). Take, as an example, the chorus of "All My Little Words":


Not for all the tea in China
Not if I could sing like a bird
Not for all North Carolina
Not for all my little words.


We get a cliché to kick things off, a genuinely humorous response two lines later, and a nice, melancholy resolution. But we also, unfortunately, have "Not if I could sing like a bird," which is unquestionably despicable filler.


The album largely comes at you from three directions: genre experiments, humor, and sentimentalism. The last is what works most consistently, especially when Merritt is so kind as to hand over vocal duties. It's nothing to do with the quality of his voice: rather, it's slightly hard to buy that he has feelings for another person (although he pulls off detached bitterness quite nicely). The humor, however, is less consistent. Although silly tracks like "Washington D.C" manage to reach something close to the sublime, in other places the "wit" seems forced and joyless. It might play well for the NPR crowd, but Merritt is entirely too willing to undermine a composition with a poorly placed bit of cleverness. The genre experiments range from cute to completely nonessential.


Perhaps overly harsh criticism aside, the 69-song volume does have more than an album's worth of good and great songs. It suffers from White Album syndrome, in that if the 15-20 best songs were collected, it would be an undeniably top-notch effort, and one feels guilty for detracting for the "extra" material. Listenability is what it comes down to, however, and here 69 Love Songs, whatever its merits, is lacking. None of its volumes maintain a consistency of quality or mood that would be required to make them great listening, and, as such, it's not a great album.