*** The Magnetic Fields

HOLIDAY

***1/2 The Magnetic Fields

THE HOUSE OF TOMORROW

(Merge)

Fields -- the primary vehicle of Stephin Merritt, also of Future Bible Heroes and the Sixths -- released both these discs in '94 on the tiny label Feel Good All Over, in whose custody they drifted out of print. Merritt is something like the indie-rock Noël Coward, bending his well-groomed, impeccably mannered baritone into delectable romantic farce. The extraordinary potency of the band's "cheap" music -- all grainy synthesizers, feeble second-hand drum machines, and gaudy disco baubles -- is self-evident all over the near-perfect five-song House of Tomorrow EP. "Love Goes Home to Paris in the Spring," "Alien Being," and "Either You Don't Love Me or I Don't Love You" spin a web of unparalleled morose (dis)enchantment, a chilly isolation warmed by unforgettable melodies and the embers of a wry wayward charm best expressed in his alternately intimate and absurd putdowns of his lovers ("You have some extra limbs/You look like a Swiss army knife with wings").

Holiday follows Merritt on vacations of various sorts from desert islands to Coney Island, from swinging London to Spanish hotels by the sea, where exquisite misery arrives without fail and wounded expectations swoon and wash ashore. Just a bit less consistently rewarding than the EP, it's worth its weight in melancholy if only for the hopelessly disconsolate "In My Secret Place" ("Time swings like a wrecking ball into things/Youth fades as quickly as a hit parade") and "The Flowers She Sent and the Flowers She Said She Sent" -- which includes the priceless lines "I saw you closing your antique shop with a boa 'round your throat/And you trembled like an ostrich in your ostrich-feather coat."

-- Carly Carioli