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http://www.rollingstone.com/assets/images/album_review/41d1b1bfa4831ccf33d8f83b0b4d29721c4a75e3.jpg Obscurities

Stephin Merritt

Obscurities

Merge
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September 12, 2011

"We are the rats in the garbage of the Western World/So let’s dance" sings Stephin Merritt on the well-named "Rats in the Garbage of the Western World," a hilariously touching tribute to The Cure that sounds like it was recorded with a Casio toy keyboard in a VW beetle. It's perfect, but not the best song on this set of Nineties rarities by a dude whose cast-offs trump most bands' masterworks: That'd be a tie between the drolly sincere ukelele marriage ballad "Forever and a Day" and a remake (w/ singer Susan Anway) of the Magnetic Fields classic "Take Ecstasy With Me." Yeah, he's a romantic; a cynic, too. But above all, a songwriter: brilliant, perverse, funny as human nature. Which is pretty damn funny.

Listen to "Forever and a Day":

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