Oh, 69 Love Songs.
I've always had a love for 'marathon' albums -- be it a drone or doom album with one monster hour-long track or some ridiculous prog-rock double album, I'm always excited to sit down with something of a ridiculous length. It's like an endurance test.
I remember when I first sat down with 69 Love Songs, years ago. It was one of the first Magnetic Fields albums I ever heard, and I thought 'Hey, this should be a perfect intro into their style.'
Instead I was blasted with three discs of just what everyone else here has pretty much said -- mediocrity. There's nothing inherently WRONG with the album, it's just too goddamn long, and the whole grungy indie-pop thing just isn't done that well.
Having sat down with it once again and listened to it almost completely straight through, a few years later...my opinion hasn't really changed. The only tracks, still, that stand out for me are 'Washington, D.C.' and 'Papa Was a Rodeo', the former just because it's catchy as **** and the latter because...I dunno why. I just like it.
There's just nothing here to really grab on to. It's one, long, droning indie-pop song, over three discs. And even I, in all my marathon listening glory, can't really get behind that.
Within the rather...tenacious theme of this month's club, I GUESS it fits the theme...triple album is close enough to double album. As for depressing...I guess that depends on what you find depressing. The styles of love songs done on this album aren't the type that really resonate with the melancholy in me.
As for the questioning of why it's ranked in the top for it's year and etc etc...I think a lot of that has to do SOLELY with the length. I know that in more experimental genres, particularly harsh noise walls and long-form doom metal, the harder something is to listen to, the more it's held up on some strange pedestal of awesome. It's as though the difficulty of getting through it adds some amount of mystical property to the album, making it better JUST because it's of a ridiculous length.
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