Magnetic Fields - Wayward Bus Distant Plastic Trees (20 tracks) +Album Reviews

Pure genius!

Collin M. David | Putnam Valley, NY USA | 11/05/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I won't go into what everyone has already said about Stephen Merritt and who he is and all, but I WILL say that Merritt's 'poor production' on this album was intentional. It gives the album a warm, personal feel, which would be totally destroyed if the electric instruments were left in their pure, harsh forms. He processes and reprocesses them until they are rough, the dead opposite of the intent behind the instruments themselves. As a result, they are friendly to us.The female vocals are representative of what one can expect to find in 'indie' music... they don't have the melodramatic passion of what is expected from mainstream music, but the almost monotone, unwavering voice on this album complements the electronic nature of it. She sings slong, not sings over the music. As a result, we have a beautiful and unexpected merging of human and machine.And who can say no to heavy experimentation? That is the only way that anything new ever happens. No, don't start your Merritt collection with this album, but don't discount it. Come back to it later, listen to it in the background, and it will grow attached to you inseperably."

The house we bought was really a lake...

W. Davidson | Melbourne, Australia | 07/15/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is my favourite of all the Magnetic Fields releases to date. It contains their first album 'Distant Plastic Trees' (minus one track - 'Plant White Roses'). It's is a strange and beautiful record full of songs that use unusual structures and orchestrations ('Babies Falliing' is little more than a folk song sung over sounds of trickling and noise, 'Living In An Abandoned Firehouse with You' uses warm atmospheric electronics and a great melody, 'Kings' is again a seemingly unstructured piece with a bizzare melody and odd backing track). On this CD all tracks are sung by Susan Anway who negotiates herself like a zombie through Stephin Merritt's lyrical word play and electronic musical mazes. The effect is stunning and not distancing as it may at first sound. Lurking amongst the obscurities is the alterna-hit '100'000 Fireflies' which sounds positively conventional in this setting.The rest of the CD (the first 10 tracks) are made up of The Wayward Bus songs which were recorded after the Distant Plastic Trees tracks. . Susan Anway is again your vocalist de jour and these songs are great in an entirely different way. There's a Phil Spector-ish vibe filtered through the Merritt lo-fi home recording system on songs like "When You Were My Baby" and "The Saddest Story Ever Told". There's the odd stinker ('Tokyo A Go Go' anyone?) but so many moments of divinity ('Candy', 'Jeremy', 'Like Lovers From the Moon') easily outweigh this. Track 11 is 4 and a half mintues of silence that separate the two sections of the CD - Why? Who knows, just chalk it up as one of the mysteries of the Magnetic Fields. I can take or leave some of the later efforts such as the 69 Love Songs extravaganza, but The Wayward Bus is a CD I constantly revisit. PS: Oh and can I just add how nice it is to again see the attractive artwork of Wendy Smith on the cover (she did the cover art for the band, Weekend, in the 1980's)."

Bittersweet and lovely

Chet Fakir | DC | 10/11/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I usually detest indie pop like this: low fi, precious, sentimentally gloopy songs with detached singing and little or no guts to the music. But damn if this doesn't work in an odd, magical way. The songs don't rock for sure, but the melodies and lyrics pack a delicate punch that can be either soothing, cathartic or just bittersweet. Songs for after the breakup with the love of your life."

I Know Your Secret Code

The Other | Mount Olympus | 08/26/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This album snuck up on me. At first I thought it was terrible, for the reasons other reviewers have mentioned (blandish vocals, messy arrangements and noise) but I listened to it a little more and got to know the songs and appreciate all of them. The quirky poetry and the entire mood the album creates has come to mean so much to me, and it has truly become one of my favorite albums- odd, imperfect, and endearing."

Time wasn't on our side.. me and my foolish bride..

Ryan Hennessy | Albany, NY | 09/18/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Okay, so first I want to note the strange ordering of this album. This is actually told old albums that were recently put together on one CD to be re-released by Merge Records. That's good for people like me because it's makes for one less CD to have to buy. But they put the Wayward Bus album before Distant Plastic Trees, even though Trees was released in 1989 and the Bus was released in 1991. If this was in chronological order, they would be reversed. And that would help a lot because there's a significant difference in the sound between the two albums. So that's how I'm going to do this review, the opposite of the way Merge wanted it. So I guess Distant Plastic Trees was the first glimpse the world had of the Magnetic Fields. Even though they were New Wave and they were synthpop, the sound doesn't strike you that way at all. There's a lot of opposing forces going on here. Stephin Merritt, *the* Magnetic Field, has a penchant for love songs, and not just love songs but ones that sound like they could have been written 70 years ago, although they do have a lot of strange twists. So in a sense, almost every Magnetic Fields song has an antique feel to it lyrically. The music is mostly programmed on keyboards and other synthesizers, but they don't sound like anything else. Merritt likes using noisy machines, comforting music being played on beat up old things that are past their prime. So the music sounds like it's striving for perfection, but it just sounds rather messy, here on the first album more than any other. And there you have the charm of the Magnetic Fields.All of the songs on this double album were sung by Susan Anway who has a classic and clean delivery juxtaposed against all the machinery around her. On the later albums, Merritt started singing the songs himself and the cocktail drummer on this album, Claudia Gonson, of all people, started singing many of the songs too. But here it's all Susan and that gives the album on a whole a consistency that none of the later releases have.Don't misunderstand me about the sound of the album either. The sound may be messy, but the melodies come through loud and clear and I don't think you could find many catchier songs than "You Love To Fail." There are times though, like in "Babies Falling" with its bubbly noise and seemingly random wind chimes sounds, that's it's hard to find the rhythm that Anway is actually singing to. It's atmospheric in a psychedelic tape machine way. And then of course there's "100,000 Fireflies," something every indie kid wants to put on a mixtape for his girlfriend.*fastforward two years!!* And here we are, back in the Greenwich Village where Stephin Merritt has finished The Wayward Bus. This one is a lot more conventional than Distant Plastic Trees. It's less noisy and random and more melodic on the whole. Add to the mix of synthesizers. a tuba, horns and cello and you can see how the Fields are evolving. Everyone should get to hear "When You Were My Baby" and "The Saddest Story Ever Told" because they're two of the most delicious examples of pop music that doesn't date itself."

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