The 6ths
Indie Rock / Low-Fi
The 6ths, every lisper's nightmare, are back with their long-awaited sophomore effort. Not that Stephin Merritt has been the most idle of songwriters lately. Gloom aficiandos have been happy with the debut of The Gothic Archies—the band in which Mr. Merritt writes the songs and performs all the instruments and vocals. Electropoppers have been grooving off the latest release by Future Bible Heroes— the band in which Mr. Merritt co-writes the songs and performs half the vocals. And, oh yeah, there's The Magnetic Fields, the band in which Mr. Merritt writes the songs and performed just about every note of 69 Love Songs, the three-disc magnum opus that ended up on every critic's poll and threatened to transform him from our favorite well-kept secret to our newest household word.
But somewhere in this maelstrom of songwriting, Mr. Merritt still found time to make his best album. The 6ths—the band in which Mr. Merritt writes the songs and lets other people sing 'em—return with Hyacinths And Thistles, another tongue-twister of a title. Whereas the first album, Wasps Nests, proclaimed Mr. Merritt's flirtation with indie pop, with contributions from the likes of Superchunk, Sebadoh and Yo La Tengo Hyacinths And Thistles is something else. Inspired by the "chanson" tradition—think Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Brel, sitting at a piano, smoking Galoises and weeping into their cognac—the new album calls to mind a dimly lit if astonishingly well-equipped musical café. A hodgepodge of vocalists—ranging from electro-pioneers to folk heroes—stop in to to share a kir royale with Mr. Merritt and learn the tune he's just finished writing on the dusty Moog in the corner. The arrangements are intimate, sometimes just one instrumentalist behind the singer.
The songs are less Brill Building perfectionist pop, more off-center, off-Broadway: showy, emotional, with the occasional loose thread hanging and odd seam showing. This is one of those albums where your favorite song will change every week, until the whole thing has grown on you and you know by heart every gentle razor of a lyric.
Written and recorded before 69 Love Songs the album shows the beginnings of the utter diversity of the three-disc set, the wilder evolutions from his comparatively similar early work. The collection of singers who agreed to participate in this round of 6ths reveal the breadth of Mr. Merritt's growing reputation and the widening spectrum of his musical interests. Often written expressly for the vocalists, the new 6ths songs allow the performers' individual personalities to mix familiar elements into brand new cocktails: sweet, bitter, bubbly, served up, in pretty glasses.
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