Album Review: Field Music - Field Music (Measure)

The 20 tracks on Field Music (Measure) stand solitarily in the same space as earnest thoughts, part of a deliberately incoherent snapshot into human emotion. It’s a return that this writer would welcome without having heard the album, and thus the highest achievement of all that it stands proud as what must surely be 2010′s finest.

Field Music’s brothers Brewis remain, but counter to that they have lost one member, gained two and upped the ante even higher. Each song on this double-album represents the musical embodiment of a feeling, with reflections spewed out in the form of sometimes emotionless, distracted reflections. The ordering of the 20 tracks is deliberately fragmented, extrapolated emotions only occasionally bleeding into one another. While anxieties on the self-titled debut and Tones of Town were on show through deliberately tense, jerky arrangements, the production here adds a richness to the sound as much as it does a braveness. White space is ever present, with gaps between sections, notes and beats as powerful as sound itsel

The identity of the person singing is unclear, but the fact that they’re in limbo, in public disarray, is something Field Music aren’t afraid to parade. Rippling guitars are placed on top of one another on ‘In The Mirror’, and as the album continues, it becomes apparent that bit-emotions are being flung at the mixing desk in a panic. Reflections are resentful, sometimes frustrated, at other times ambivalent and occasionally deliberately detached; this album’s constructed narrator becomes the most realistic story-teller of them all. Images of “eyes that step to the side” on ‘The Wheels Are In Place’ recur through a grey, forcibly reclusive soul’s self-frustration, ‘First Comes The Wish’ straight after it forming a part-thought emotion told in isolation of a situation. It seems to be not about a breakdown, just how instability and frustration are oddly not thought of as part of the average day-to-day. It’s effortlessly all-consuming.

Segueing a personal, reflective number into the dehumanising ‘Them That Do Nothing’ realigns the centre immediately, via rippling instrumental passages and thoughtful use of sound. “We tried to stand for nothing/now there’s nothing to stand for,” this one goes, as harmonies conflict against the tide and slippery, slidey guitars become an antidote to the character’s feelings of despondency. Field Music’s thinking man isn’t always banging his head against a wall so hardily, such as on ‘Effortlessly’, whose  jovial turns of phrase and steady, reassuring beats casually dissipate the confusion. The vocals on this album are even more graceful and eloquently enunciated than on Field Music’s two previous albums, and its busier sections closer to a rock-out. Songs build, slow down and peak again – nothing moves sidewards, and each added instrument is an emotion’s transient life-span. Long instrumental passages are like silent thought, and songs end like commas.

The addition of strings on weightier arrangements truly show off Field Music’s deft way with textures. Every playback is a new, untainted education, a day-trip into a gap-filled personal shambles. The small-town milieu of Tones Of Town is gone; they’re not afraid to rock out now, and there are even hints to incoherentprog-jazz.

‘The Rest Is Noise’ is all multi-layered and contrasting. The dense piano-hammering sounds like a drone, set behind dissonant whimpering vocals and another of those introverted instrumental sections to take time and step back from later on. ‘Clear Water’ features Fleetwood Mac style power-singing of the lyrics“free water” against a two-part counterpoint-style arrangement, uncomfortably subtle. It’s about relief, with water used as a metaphor, and it’s most probably the exposition of months, maybe years in the studio getting rid of each superfluous demi-quaver and slightly-too-late slice of reverb. “My eyelids are shaking/I can’t sustain this conversation/all this talk and no decision/this can’t be how you envisioned it”, it rings out, as the character sits in the corner beating himself up until he cries. And at the other end of the spectrum lies ‘See You Later’, starting on a found-sound song-cycle, replacing thought with context. Over a minute of sounds come together before it picks up.

‘Let’s Write A Book’ acts as an earnest slap on the face of the perpetual apologist, with scattergunpercussion rhythms sucking the life out of this person who lives on association-by-memory. It’s a new world for Field Music, featuring distorted guitars and inward-looking vocals. The frustrated, impersonal ‘narrator’ sounds increasingly manic on the polyrhythms of ‘Each Time Is A New Time’, as much as he is confined by the 24-hour day. And with each minute of each hour comes each note of every bar, a chord that kicks in and recurs in context-shifting time signatures. The choruses are so rich with sound that the sparse section midway through feels like a bolt to the head. Structures have deliberately been written to get under the listener’s skin, slowly and more strongly with each playback.

Fascinated with what it takes to be an illogical human, the 20 tracks showcase people setting themselves limits and taking chances from their measure, their default. As unstructured as it feels, after repeated listens it’s hard to imagine sequenced any other way. That combined with the frenetic end-section are examples of how expertly Field Music (Measure) is crafted, and just how much thought and obsession has gone into it.

Tip-toeing around the greatness of this album is impossible, and instead I find myself asking just what it takes to proclaim something amongst the best of a genus, an astounding piece of work that I, the listener, can feel. Maybe it’s about nothing being missing, about an admiration for how its constituent parts have come together. Or it could be more about an intangible love and unjustifiable awe, or perhaps how the thing in question being better than something else, or the act of becoming part of its world.

Field Music (Measure) rises and soars above and beyond the realms of what I was thought my personal measure to an entirely new level of greatness.