Stephin Merritt and friends return to Merge Records (their last Merge release was 1999's 69 Love Songs) for Love at the Bottom of the Sea, due next March. According to a release, Love feature the band's "signature mix of synth and acoustic sounds; according to Stephen Merritt, the synths are pretty crucial. "Instead of using a synthesizer as a melodic instrument, much of the time I used it as a compositional destructive mechanism, something eating away at the apparent order of my perfectionist arrangements. I was very happy to be using synthesizers in ways that I had not done before. Most of the synthesizers on the record didn't exist when we were last using synthesizers." Compositional deconstructive mechanisms! Put that in your "synth" thesaurus.
