Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
Music: Mad About You [CD-single] [Import]
Wallpaper Mach 1.5 / Limitless Luxury
When the Spirit Returns [Import]
Trio Transition With Special Guest Oliver Lake
Amazon.com
Perhaps we've been spoiled by the prolific talents of Stephen Merritt. He's the brainchild behind the 6ths, Magnetic Fields, and Future Bible Heroes, which all prove that sentimentality didn't die out with the Tin Pan Alley songsmith. And we've come to expect nothing short of brilliance from him (which he so perfectly illustrated in the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs). The 6ths is less a band than a studio project, an outlet in which Merritt's higher-marquee friends get to cover the songwriter's ditties. The lineup of guest vocalists on Hyacinths and Thistles is impressive enough (Gary Numan, Melanie, Bob Mould, Odetta, and Sally Timms, to name a few), but the moments of synth-pop brilliance--Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell on "Kissing Things" and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon on "The Dead Only Quickly"--are few and far between. Odetta's "Waltzing Me All the Way Home" sounds like a heartfelt Tom Waits tune, but it follows Marc Almond's overblown exotica track, "Volcana!" Yes, Mr. Merritt, we know you have a lot of musical friends whose ability to traverse styles (from disco to sea shanty) is impressive. But whereas Wasps' Nests, the 6ths' debut CD, felt like a cohesive song cycle, Hyacinths and Thistles sounds like a thrown-together tribute disc. --Jason Verlinde