What IS this song?!? PLEASE HELP

I have a soft spot for duets in which there is genuine conflict between the singers, so this kind of satisfies on that level. Incidentally I wound up seeing Mag Fields last year, which was just a terrible idea, insofar as they come off very smarmy and boring these days; worst of all was the way the audience giggled at every rhyme as if they’d never heard 69 Love Songs before, or anyway didn’t think of the material as anything but comedy-band jokery; and so the worst of it was when they played this song, which is kind of gloriously sneering and anguished at points, and everyone just chuckled. The knife bit if a little funny, granted, but the bleating chorus mockery thing strikes me as pretty affecting (as well as formally clever).

Oh, I blame them as much as the audience. The whole thing was like some sort of terrible joke where they know if they just strum ukeleles and act droll then everyone will giggle and love them; the only bit I enjoyed was Merritt mentioning "Hobart Paving" and then, when no one knew what he was talking about, singing a bit of the chorus. Everything else rankled me terribly. It's like he's a dancing bear for the NPR set and nothing more, whereas in my perfect world he'd be surrounded by synths and very bitter.

i believe if you go over his house that's exactly what you'll find.

On a ferris wheel / looking out on Coney Island
Under more stars than / there are prostitutes in Thailand

is, to my mind, far more of a romantic line than a "funny" one, insofar as the comparison, while left-field and loopy, is still remarkably apt. (If you want to get super-literary about it there's also the idea of conjuring romance via prostitution.) Similarly the Susan Anway stuff, which can be just wrecking; I cringe to imagine portions of one of his present-day audiences giggling over "it makes me want to kill myself" and other such surprises. I just don't get this from him any more, not nearly as much -- and that, more than the synths or the sound, is why I'm more likely to listen to Holiday or the first 6ths album than anything he's done recently. (There are long stretches of 69 Love Songs, which I do really like, that hit it, and songs that hit other things I find just as engaging; I think it's more the after-effects of that success that have depressed me.)