The Magnetic Fields - '81 How to play the synthesizer

It's an instructive manual! It's an ode to discovering how to make music! It's the fun statement of a certain moment in life! '81 How to Play the Synthesizer is all of that and much more. Stephin Merritt's new concept album so him penning a song for each year of his life so far, and as a result, he gift us 50 tracks that take you on a time travel and more than a full autobiography, they are vignettes that show the complexities of Merritt as a human being; from his naïvety as a child to his concerns as a young homosexual man, to his frustrations as a mature artist, all of them through moments like the death of Judy Garland and the spread of the AIDS disease.

He's take on the year of 1981 (when he was 15 years old) is by showing his newest discovery: the synthesizer. Of course, the entirety of the music is made by this instrument, and he goest detailing, as in a manual, how to use this instrument with the one "You can make a thousand sounds never heard before". But what in the surface could sound like a cold list of instructions, hides riches layers of meaning; it's the excitement of a teenager who has found his passion and that feels he can change the world with the superpowers of his new weapon, it is also the portrait of a time where synth pop came to change the music forever ('81 was the year when Soft Cell released Tainted Love, Depeche Mode did I Just Can't Get Enough, and New Order emerged with Ceremony) and it revives the excitement of a whole generation craving for new things in pop music.

But even when dictating a manual, Merritt plays it smart and cool, he instructs to "Go to the filter bank /Fiddle with the cutoff point / Pour yourself a scotch" and then he summarizes that "it sounds like you're torturing little metal elves". That wit puts warmth in the robotics, the excitement of discovering the possibilities (that seem endless) of your new toy is the same awe that we had when, as kids we pressed a button to hear the hiss of a snake or the moo of a cow. If you can make a manual be this fun and complex (not in the instructions, but in the meaning of them), you clearly have succeeded as a musician.