smoke and mirrors, special effects, a little fear, a little sex
Thursday, 25 June 2009 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtHah! knew it. Administration is clearly bad for the dream-life, I need another job, stat. Not even a full week of leave, and last night I dreamed I was cuddling one of the young Arnold Schwarzenegger's musclebound gun-toting characters on a mattress on the floor of a hotel room in the French Riviera. (Which is odd, as I seriously don't like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Possibly because I can't spell him). Later I stopped off at the run-down petrol station in the middle of nowhere in order to fill up my scooter with milk and also to decline, definitively, to make an emergency bridge fourth for a tournament. Even in the dreamscape my absolute hatred of bridge and all its ilk shone forth very clearly.
I have been listening to the Magnetic Fields for the last week or so, the three new albums I've just acquired - Get Lost, Holiday and The Charm of the Highway Strip. This is earlier Fields, the few before I, which is the one before 69 Love Songs. I was all ready to be all "meh" about them - they aren't doing to me what 69 Love Songs did, which was to charm me utterly and instantly with a sort of wicked, louche genre-bending (and man, am I ever a slut for genre) and insane levels of tunefulness and zan (which is the noun for "zany" I just made up). All three of these earlier albums lack the vibrate-your-teeth catchiness of 69 Love Songs, but after the third listen or so I've realised that in fact they've been sneakily climbing up my spine while I wasn't looking to coil affectionately around my cerebellum. I have a sort of vague impression that the songs are all boring and uniform - possibly as much because of Stephin Merritt's mournful baritone as anything else - but I realise that any particular song I happen to be listening to at a given moment is neither boring nor uniform, but quirky, recognisable and subtly catchy. 69 Love Songs is almost an intensification of the qualities of the earlier albums, but its roots are definitely here, and digging deeper into my consciousness by the minute. Magnetic Fields, voted Band Most Likely To Turn Out To Be An Alien Brain Parasite. Fact.
I have been listening to the Magnetic Fields for the last week or so, the three new albums I've just acquired - Get Lost, Holiday and The Charm of the Highway Strip. This is earlier Fields, the few before I, which is the one before 69 Love Songs. I was all ready to be all "meh" about them - they aren't doing to me what 69 Love Songs did, which was to charm me utterly and instantly with a sort of wicked, louche genre-bending (and man, am I ever a slut for genre) and insane levels of tunefulness and zan (which is the noun for "zany" I just made up). All three of these earlier albums lack the vibrate-your-teeth catchiness of 69 Love Songs, but after the third listen or so I've realised that in fact they've been sneakily climbing up my spine while I wasn't looking to coil affectionately around my cerebellum. I have a sort of vague impression that the songs are all boring and uniform - possibly as much because of Stephin Merritt's mournful baritone as anything else - but I realise that any particular song I happen to be listening to at a given moment is neither boring nor uniform, but quirky, recognisable and subtly catchy. 69 Love Songs is almost an intensification of the qualities of the earlier albums, but its roots are definitely here, and digging deeper into my consciousness by the minute. Magnetic Fields, voted Band Most Likely To Turn Out To Be An Alien Brain Parasite. Fact.
