I would have been more cautious, but it seemed so insane to expect danger. Focus and brevity are two of its central virtues. Multiplying the running-time by six, the vocalist roster by five and the style palette by a hundred or so seemed as inane a strategy for engendering epiphany as trying to improve on the nectarine by growing one the size of Delaware. If I were choosing guides for a Dantesque tour of the Levels of Art, Stephin Merritt would be low on my list. Polymaths are poor emotional counsel.
Cathedral architecture uses different skills than arming booby-trapped costume jewelry.
There's a perverse conceptual brilliance in such a wildly impractical notion as an album that renders a titular allusion to simultaneous oral sex nominally innocent, however disingenuously, but a joke that takes three hours to tell demands a better punch line than tame double-entendre. If there isn't a third of these songs notably better than the rest, the only sensible explanation is that they're all terrible. And yet here I am, listening to the entire box straight through for the whateverth time I've forgotten, wondering what topological subterfuge will be required to extricate me. I can feel myself forgetting how much I liked The Charm of the Highway Strip , revising history to make 69 Love Songs into the musical equivalent of William Goldman's The Princess Bride , a facile minor craftsman's unexpectedly-conceived masterwork, simultaneously individual and encyclopedic, inventive and comprehensive. By the second hour, if not earlier, the strain should show, like we're laboring to extract far too many variations from a premise without enough complexity or nuance to support them, but instead the songs seem dumbfoundingly effortless to me, like we asked Stephin to find the six dozen most beautiful people in the world and he just walked out into the street and started touching strangers on the arm, correct by virtue of irresistible affection and faith.