For an artist with so many projects and musical outlets (and lets face it, Stephin Merritt has been fantastically prolific over the years) an obscurities package presents more than your usual stop gap between albums. Rather it serves as a primer for things you might have missed, things that first saw the light of day as 7” b-sides, location specific bonus tracks or alternative takes on subsequently released songs. Obscurities also includes five unreleased tunes from projects that haven’t quite come to fruition (three songs here are from the sci-fi musical ‘The Song From Venus’ that he co-write with Daniel “Lemony Snickett” Handler) , which alongside tracks recorded as Stephin Merritt, Buffalo Rome, The Magnetic Fields, The 6ths and The Gothic Archies make up the fourteen songs on the record.

Opener ‘Forever And A Day’, taken from “The Song From Venus” project, is classic Merritt fare, and could well give ‘The Book Of Love’ from 69 Love Songs a run for its money as the Merrit song most suited to play at a wedding – minimally strummed uke and a delicate piano line play over his sombre baritone declaring his love. In a similarly minimal vein is ‘The Sun And The Sea And The Sky’, an out-take from 69 Love Songs, apparently left out for not being about romantic love. 69‘s loss is Obscurities gain, however, as the song demonstrates the rich vein of songwriting form Merritt was mining during that period. Together with the original seven inch version of ‘I Don’t Believe You’, which employs bleeping synths rather than the fuller strings of the later i album version, and the lolloping beats of The 6ths ‘Yet Another Girl’ (a close companion piece to the later Magnetic Fields ‘The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side’) it is one of the highlights of the record.

Obscurities also shines the light on Merritt’s pre-ocupation with the murkier side of the world he finds himself in, with varying levels of success – the nihilistic ‘Rats In The Garbage Of The Western World’ finds Merritt intoning the songs title like a mantra over a fuzzy looping synth line, while ‘Scream (Till You Make The Scene)’ and ‘Rot in The Sun’ turn on the music scene where you just have to “Write 12 simple songs with a beat…and scream till you make the scene”, or “You can make an atrocious top 40 record / no one will know in 2 weeks time.” Elsewhere, ‘When I’m Not Looking, You’re Not There’ finds Merritt willfully obscuring his song with a seemingly arbitrary series of jarring keyboard samples for no apparent reason other than because he can, while ‘Beach-A-Boop-Boop’ is a rather throwaway surf-pop number that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome. There’s also a couple of alternate versions included for good measure, including early Magnetic Field’s vocalist Susan Anway taking lead duties for “Take Ecstacy With Me” and Shirley Simms take on ‘Plant White Roses’.

While it is easy to see why some of the tracks here have remained in the sidelines until now, there is still plenty to appreciate on Obscurities, providing as it does an excellent way into the deeper cuts of a particular period of an undoubtedly prolific career.