Access Atlanta > Arts > Our Reviews > Archives > 2004 > December > 07
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Magnetic Fields play Variety Playhouse
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The members of Magnetic Fields sat on three kinds of furniture Monday night at Variety Playhouse: a piano bench for Claudia Gonson, chairs for cellist Sam Davol and guitarist/banjoist John Woo, and, for lead singer Stephin Merritt a stool.
There he sat, off to the right-hand side, a little man on a tall stool. He wore a paperboy’s cap and cocked his head ever so slightly, sometimes cradling an instrument, sometimes not. He looked like Paul Simon and sounded like a cross between the dark folkie Leonard Cohen and the monotone comic Steven Wright.
Magnetic Fields songs are terse, tuneful and almost always about love. The band was able to fit more than two dozen of them into their 105-minute set. A great number were rearranged from the studio versions, usually slowed down and shaded with an extra shadow of melancholy.
Without a drummer or even a drum machine, many songs lost their edge. What they gained was space — this band, which is sometimes suitable for the dance floor, sounded very much like a chamber ensemble. The Variety Playhouse, not a small room, felt intensely intimate at times, and the band more than once berated the audience for daring to move around during the songs.
Woe be unto the person who upsets Merritt’s delicate sensibilities. His songwriting is full of cutting observations — sample song titles: “I Don’t Really Love You Anymore� and “I Wish I Had an Evil Twin� — and he’s not afraid to turn his tongue on the audience. Near the end, someone desperately called out for “100,000 Fireflies,� one of the band’s early successes. Merritt dryly replied, “We can’t hear you, and we don’t take requests,� and then moved right into “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!,� a boy-girl duet in which the female voice (Gonson) asks Merritt a series of questions (such as “Are you reaching for a knife?/Could you really kill your wife?�) and Merritt deadpans the song’s title affirmative. It was, in an odd way, the night’s giddiest moment.
