Previously unpublished, originally written for The Boar.
Field Music – Field Music (Measure) (Memphis Industries)
The video for 'Them That Do Nothing', the second song on this 72-minute fourth album, is filmed in the Brewis brothers' native Sunderland, a city left behind by post-industrial 'regeneration' even more thoroughly than neighbouring Newcastle: unkempt streets, empty industrial spaces, dank underpasses. Over a spry rhythm threaded with bright and smartly melodic guitar, they trade, in those unmistakable accents, uncannily familiar sentiments: “Well once we were concerned/Then we grew up to be bored... We tried to stand for nothing/Now there's nothing to stand for”. But (handclaps popping) they remind us that the only solution is to “Get your keys and get to work”, the cryptic but adeptly literate wordspill coalescing for a second like clouds forming recognisable shapes.
They know at least how to take their own advice. After a brief hiatus which saw records by the brothers' solo projects, they've returned with their most ambitious work yet. Field Music take their inspiration from the British art-pop tradition of XTC, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush: intelligent, polished, oblique, haunted by ideas of what it is to be English, possibilities whose energy courses through these 20 tracks, animated by a sense of drama, cohesion and emotional weight gold-dust rare in the world of landfill-indie. 'Lights Up', slowly rising and exploding, incandescent with strings. 'Effortlessly's unashamedly complex stomp, the ass-wiggle in its riff. The intertwining of the Brewis brothers' voices throughout in wry, eccentric and smart gestures. The queasy synths on 'Let's Write A Book' blurting upward among wah-wah squalls. The way 'Precious Plans' shifts from mantra moving over hypnotic fingerpicking to violin-threaded requiem: “Where are those futureless precious plans/Where we had a place to get to/A place that lasted?”
This record seems to capture what it feels like to be a thinking person in Britain 2010: the irony and crooked humour that gets us through the days; the sense of betrayal; the dread and fits of darkness. By the time you read this, we might well be living under a Tory government. It keeps me up at night: that we've inherited a world without choice, in which hope is not a given but the hardest of burdens; that the best we can expect is so much less than our hearts demand. The last words, before the string-haunted field-recordings – alley-footsteps, backfiring cars – of 'It's About Time', are those of desperation that hopes – that knows – there is still a world to be won: “I have a lot to learn/But I have clung to you.”
