Stephin Merritt Has a “Fields” Day With His Mostly “Magnetic” Set

The Magnetic Fields don’t look like what you’d expect. For a band with a unique, appealingly catchy sound, it is remarkably anti-hipster.

The five-person ensemble finished up a sold-out four-concert series at Town Hall yesterday. Headlined by the prodigious Stephin Merritt, the band put on shows that were much more formal than the typical rock concert. The performers were seated, each playing an acoustic instrument and reading from sheet music.

Merritt, who played banjo, and Claudia Gonson, the band’s pianist, shared the stage banter duty, while cellist Sam Davol, guitarist John Woo, and vocalist Shirley Simms remained largely silent.

Although the Magnetic Fields are famous for their rather unconventional sounds—many albums feature synthesizers and a variety of unusual instruments—their Town Hall concerts were acoustic with the help of basic amplification.

At 42 years old, Merritt is older than one might expect, and rather unremarkable in appearance. He’s quiet, introverted, and constantly sports a small-brimmed hat over his round face. Gonson, for her part, is almost 40, and—in the most affectionate sense of the word—rather frumpy.

Besides playing songs from their new album Distortion, the Magnetic Fields revived old favorites from their epic, 1999 three-disc 69 Love Songs. Simms’s ethereal voice debuted on that album, singing lead in songs such as “Come Back from San Francisco.” She has recently been minted as a permanent band member, but she looked slightly uncomfortable on stage with no instrument, as she only sang periodically.

The low, resonant tenor of Merritt’s voice is unmistakable—he writes and sings some of the cleverest and most surprising lyrics in contemporary music. When he hits the lowest note in “Walking My Gargoyle,” a song from the soundtrack to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, it is almost shocking.

Maybe it’s superficial to be surprised by the appearance of this talent group, but it’s also refreshing to see a group purely concerned with the integrity of its music and not just the latest trends.