If you ever have an entire weekend to dedicate to music listening (for me, that's every weekend), spend some time with the Magnetic Field's 69 Love Songs. It manages to be amazingly consistent despite being the second longest album I've ever heard, since Tom Waits was able to top it with Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards last fall.
Two things hold 69 Love Songs together and make it worth playing for an entire 3 hours: his voice and his sense of humor. He writes pop melodies that are memorable, but they never last long enough to wear themselves out since very few of these songs last past three minutes and none last past four. The result is some beautiful ballads ("I Don't Believe In The Sun", "Busby Berkeley Dreams"), some catchy pop songs that should be hits ("I Don't Want To Get over You", "It's A Crime"), and some moments that are just plain goofy ("Washington DC", "Love Is Like Jazz"). These songs are some of my favorites, but every listener who takes time with all three discs seems to find their own.
Today, it's a lot easier for bands to release no-restraint artpieces like this one due to word-of-mouth fanbases and Internet distribution, but this album was a few years ahead of its time when it was released in 1999. Remember, that was the year pop music on the radio and MTV made its last stand: everybody was listening to Limp Bizkit, Creed, the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync (thank you Florida for your great musical contributions). The Magnetic Fields, along with the Flaming Lips, Pavement, and Wilco, really helped turn a corner in American music at the end of the 90s.
It took the Magnetic Fields 5 years to follow this up: the result was a spotty, disappointing record called i. I haven't heard their new album (Distortion) yet, but with 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt has contributed more than his share to the last ten years of indie music.
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