69 Love Songs lark 'The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side' is the production number from a forgotten sad-sack musical, and in 'As You Turn to Go,' Momus annunciates the classic line 'I know you've had more loves than Mata Hari/But you know that you're the star of my life story' with an exquisitely rendered mixture of decadence and true longing. The new 'Stray With Me' extrapolates a happy relationship through better and worse, wedding cakes and wakes - but its burbling bottom end and cut-up cello suggest the soundtrack to a dream sequence. It's pointedly brief (the entire album occurs in under 27 minutes), but Merritt showers each moment of April with ridiculously perfect raindrops. Pieces of April features ten electronics and guitar-tinged pop songs made by Merritt: four previously unreleased Magnetic Fields songs 'One April Day,' written exclusively for the film three from the 1999 opus 69 Love Songs and two from the 6ths' Hyacinths and Thistles, with featured vocalists. However, they're often laced with true-love pixie dust, and cause hangovers of the headily romantic variety. His tunes are steeped in city-person cynicism and the recognition of melancholy as a means to an end.

Stephin Merritt's music makes similar decisions. But the fire escape is a quick, hardened route to the same location, and there's no one to pass on the way up or down. Everyone knows where its long flights and landings lead. In Pieces of April, love is an underused back stairway.

Pieces of april