Best Local Electronica

Future Bible Heroes

Poison cocktail Stephen Merritt finally followed through with his promise to release a Gothic Archies EP last year (a damn good conceptual one-liner with a really funny song about a suicidal goat), but it was the Future Bible Heroes' Memories of Love (Slow River/Rykodisc) that assumed the mantle of Merritt's gorgeously morose Magnetic Fields/6ths empire. Man Ray-associated DJ Christopher Ewen provides the music, a frothy '80s-vintage synth-wave carnival that's as close to Merritt's beloved ABBA as any of his projects have come, with some sprightly cocktail-vibe updates thrown in for good measure ("She-Devils of the Deep" could be the Damned's Dave Vanian fronting Arthur Lyman's band). Merritt comes through with a lyric sheet that proposes a beauty as cold as marble (see "Blonde Adonis") and suggests that love is a uniformly narcissistic and futile enterprise. Put 'em together -- with Merritt's all-purpose collaborator Claudia Gonson sharing vocal duties -- and the song that sounds most like a suicide is actually the funniest ("Death Opened a Boutique"), while the catchiest is actually the most suicidal ("Hopeless"). And though they're neither uniformly local nor in step with the current electronica craze that inspired this category, we're happy to have finally found something for these guys to win.

-- Carly Carioli