Field Music - Disc of the day

Field Music
Tones Of Town

(Memphis Industries, 2007)

21st Century manifesto for something we like to call “progressive pop”.

There’s never really been a British Steely Dan, despite the ’80s brainstorming of Prefab Sprout and Thomas Dolby. Perhaps we’ve lacked the right type of musicians – jazz-trained but pop smart – or maybe the inclination to produce something so simultaneously sweet yet sour. Sunderland’s Field Music (step forward, brothers Peter and David Brewis, plus keyboard maestro Andrew Moore) share a deceptive surface serenity with the Dan, a similarly restless musical imagination, and – if the wry, stinging guitar break in opening track Give It Lose It Take It is anything to go by, a familiarity with the oeuvre of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter.

Since this 2007 opus the brothers have branched out, making excellent records as the David-led School Of Language and Peter-centric The Week That Was, but they may yet struggle to top this 31-minute barrage of constantly surprising music, a brilliantly paced song-cycle interlaced with the brothers’ dry, enigmatic takes on the modern complaint (“leisure is useless when you find nothing is easy”). Give It Lose It Take it dares to face off Genesis keyboards with Steve Reich marimbas. Sit Tight is a Sparks-indebted nano-opera with the whitest human beatboxing you’ll ever hear, while Working To Work’s syncopated piano-and-guitar duel turn a meditation on the pointlessness of everything into the record’s jauntiest ditty. It’s thrillingly sophisticated, but never jarring, overly pungent or mad-for-the-sake-of-it: pop music, in other words, that’s clever enough to ensure that you’re never too far away from a snatch of transfiguring melody or liquid vocal deliciousness, and almost neurotically loath to outstay its welcome.

Danny Eccleston

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 25/06/2008

Further Listening

The Week That Was – The Week That Was (Memphis Industries)

Steely Dan – Countdown To Ecstasy (MCA)

Prefab Sprout – Steve McQueen (Kitchenware)

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Yeah, great album, as is the debut. Never thought of those comparisons meself though, interesting. They always made me think of mid-period XTC, sort of from 'Mummer' to 'Skylarking'.

Posted by Sinbad at 1:00 PM GMT 25/06/2008 Report Abuse

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