The 6ths: Hyacinths And Thistles

After creating some of the smartest, most resonant music of the '90s, Stephin Merritt finally attained widespread recognition last year with the release of The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, a sprawling, eclectic, justly acclaimed three-disc set. It wasn't Merritt's best work, but its many strong moments more than compensated for the occasional lapse into self-indulgence. Originally conceived as an upscale revue, 69 Love Songs found Merritt indulging his passion for Tin Pan Alley songcraft and pop standards, creating music that owes as much to the work of Gershwin and Porter as it does the work of his modern-rock colleagues. Recording as The 6ths, Merritt fuses the two worlds on Hyacinths And Thistles, recruiting such unlikely balladeers as Bob Mould and Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori to sing spare, lovelorn songs about hopeless romantics measuring their lives against the impossible fantasies of the silver screen and coming up short every time. While Merritt sang only one song on The 6ths' 1995 debut Wasps' Nests, he leaves vocal duties entirely to his guests here, an impressive group that includes new-wave forebear Gary Numan and '70s warbler Melanie alongside an all-star collection of indie-rock fixtures. Unfortunately, he's given them some of his weakest material to date, delicate but forgettable songs that often sound like discarded leftovers from 69 Love Songs. Many of the songs on H&T sound heartbreakingly vulnerable and intimate, as when Melanie croons "I've Got New York" accompanied only by a toy piano, but they're also thin and incomplete, like promising first drafts Merritt never quite got around to finishing. The commercial and critical success of 69 Love Songs creates the possibility that H&T will reach Merritt's largest audience to date, which makes it even more of a shame that it's one of his weakest efforts. Future Bible Heroes is yet another Merritt side project, a group for which he splits vocals with longtime collaborator Claudia Gonson and shares songwriting duties with Christopher Ewen. I'm Lonely (And I Love It) is the group's latest EP, and while it's nowhere near as conceptually ambitious as 69 Love Songs or H&T, it features Merritt doing what he does best: writing songs that are smart, funny, literate, and far catchier than anything on commercial radio. The EP's propulsive, electro-pop title song buoyantly sets the tone, with Merritt singing from the perspective of a happily deluded soul who is "lonely as Mount Everest and probably as high." With the exception of the gloomy, dirge-like "Café Hong Kong," the remainder of the five-song disc is as hilariously effervescent as its catchy title track, a minor but enormously enjoyable work from a songwriter with few peers.