Stephin Merritt: Eban & Charley : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Long, long ago (1992,Man!), with a band called the Magnetic Fields, Stephin Merritt wrote a song called "100,000 Fireflies," and that image is still the most telling description of his poetical love pop. Merritt's lower-than-low singing, jangling guitars and synths, and classic-pop melodies always seem to glow like lightning bugs on a summer night. On this soundtrack for a film about a gay May-December love affair, the singer-songwriter limns his passions for the abstract and the goopy. The set alternates between weird fragments such as "Cricket Problem," a collage of mechanical whirring and insect buzzing, and larger-than-life plaints like "Some Summer Day," which echoes grandly like a fusion of spaghetti-western music and the girly bathos of the Ronettes. The strummy, evanescent "Maria Maria Maria" could be a great country tearjerker by Marty Robbins - one can almost see Merritt tugging his forelock as he sings it. The combination of quietly gorgeous pop songs and noise bites struggling to become quietly gorgeous pop songs makes for bewitching Sunday-morning listening. If the movie is half as poignant as Merritt's soundtrack, cineplexes nationwide will soon be experiencing severe Kleenex shortages.

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 890 - February 28, 2002)