In Stores Now: Obscurities by Stephin Merritt

Illustration from an advertisement for Sanforized cotton, 1953

A few years ago, I made a compilation of non-album tracks by Stephin Merritt, collected from his various bands and projects (e.g. the Magnetic Fields, the Gothic Archies, the 6ths, the Future Bible Heroes). I called it Stephinsongs - it had twenty-four tracks, and it revealed that I had reached unhealthy levels of affection for Merritt's songwriting. Now, Merritt has released his own collection of rarities called Obscurities, and it only has one track in common with my own compilation, meaning that these tracks are really (as the title suggests) pretty obscure. But that doesn't mean that they are inferior cast-offs, necessarily.

In fact, there's a good argument to be made that Obscurities is the best overview of Merritt's oeuvre that's been released to date. The songs cover the entire span of his songwriting career, from recent solo tracks going all the way back to early Magnetic Fields recordings with Susan Anway ("Take Ecstasy With Me") and even earlier ("Beach-a-Boop-Boop", which dates back to Merritt's teenage years). There are first-rate songs representing the 6ths (the Stuart-Moxham-sung "Yet Another Girl"), 69 Love Songs-era Magnetic Fields ("The Sun and the Sea and the Sky"), and the Gothic Archies ("You Are Not My Mother and I Want to Go Home"). Only a few tracks here rank up there with Merritt's very best but, even though Obscurities doesn't sound anything like a coherent album, it does a good job of showing the breadth of his songwriting prowess. Take the brief ballad "Forever and a Day" - like several of the tracks on Obscurities, it is a rough draft written for the never-finished musical The Song From Venus, but it doesn't sound like a disposable demo. With a songwriter of Merritt's caliber, even the obscurities are highly listenable.

"Forever and a Day" by Stephin Merritt