Realism, The Magnetic Fields' latest album, was released earlier today, and, while singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt offer his own witty explanation for his choice of album title, in the video series at nonesuch.com/media, NPR's Fresh Air suggests it's a perfectly apt reflection of the album.

Fresh Air music critic Ken Tucker says that Merritt—that "master of the cutting understatement, as well as the elegant overstatement"—has created in these songs "a realism that is vivid, hard-headed and never half-hearted. He does something true."

That last statement is a reference to a lyric from the album track "The Dada Polka," which Tucker describes as "the perfect use of [Merritt's] broad taste and essentially bohemian world view," in which the narrator urges his listener to "Do something true." It's exactly that, says Tucker, that Merritt has done himself on the songs of Realism, such that, when taken together, they may even make "a statement bigger than their creator may have intended."

Read more and listen to the review at npr.org.

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SPIN magazine gives Realism four stars. "Stunningly blending American country, English folk, and Victorian pomp," says reviewer Spencer Kornhaber, "the album documents a life resigned to sadness amid a world brimming with beauty both real and fake." You can read that review at spin.com.