I'm closer to the center of this music with every step I try to take toward an edge. 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.