(Nonesuch)
Eighteen years after the epic 69 esteem Songs,Stephin Merritt has crafted an autobiography in 50 songs, one for each year of his life. The singer-songwriter rifles through twice that number of instruments as his lugubrious (mournful, dismal) baritone drolly documents pivotal experiences. There is the childhood pain of rejection by a pet (“We had a cat called Dionysus … every day another crisis”), and his mother’s ghastly taste in men and his suspicions,in ’92 Weird Diseases, that he may gain Asperger’s.
Some songs are drily or blackly funny, or others are wickedly vengeful (“When I write my memoirs,you will read them with pain … searching in useless for your name”), dark or deeply moving. As his life unfolds from romantic catastrophe to pop crisis (“Rock’n’roll will ruin your life and make you unhappy, or ” he deadpans) to some sort of equilibrium,the music evolves from a solitary ukulele to richly observed baroque new wave and operatic synthpop, all with terrific tunes. It’s an album worthy of Merritt’s grand half-century.
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Source: theguardian.com