Field Music - Field Music (Measure) (Memphis Industries)

It seems that pop has always been defined by the seemingly irreconcilable tension between its makers’ restless quest for immortality and their music’s fundamentally ephemeral nature. Yet at its basest level pop music aims to freeze-frame a moment in time – a moment when its creators will forever be wrinkle-free and that song means as much as it ever can, or will. The song itself should be the immortal medium, remaining identical long after the people who sired it have slipped off this mortal coil. The very essence of the ‘rock star’ is flawed – if your music really matters it will outlive you, and the fountain of youth will preserve a memory as fleeting as the period when Dorian Gray saw his true reflection in a portrait.

Fatalistic? Sure, but this undeniable truth is what lends those fleeting moments such gravitas. Take Field Music’s closest contemporaries and sometime bandmates, The Futureheads, who in a dizzying twist of luck (or fate) managed to craft a perfect pop album first time round, and since have suffered at the hands of the law of ever-diminishing returns. So in some ways you’d expect the same fate to have befallen the brothers Brewis – they write guitar songs with perfectly executed triple-layer harmonies; Beach Boys, Beatles and post-punk influences present and correct Saah. Undeniably pop musicians in every way then. So why is it that three albums down the line they remain as difficult to fathom as ever – and all the more rewarding for it?

2007’s Tones Of Town was a slow-building word-of-mouth hit, almost certainly given an interest boost by the immediate ‘indefinite hiatus’ that gave the band time to focus on side projects. But it was never an easy listen, shredding a list of influences as long as your arm into a jumbled collage of jagged edges and sudden washes of smooth orchestration. Three-odd years down the line, Tones Of Town still seems to delight in revealing its hidden facets. And therein lies the reason why their follow-up Field Music (Measure) remains as beguiling as its older brother – it’s pop, sure, but it’s also more than pop, at once deceptively simple and deceptively complex.

A case in point: the cocky swagger of ‘Each Time Every Time’, suddenly offset by flourishes of cascading keyboard instrumentation and operatic vocal battles. And as suddenly as you’ve managed to work out where they’re going, they change tack, dropping into an ever-building coda that suddenly rattles to a halt. It’s disjointed in the way that Of Montreal’s Skeletal Lamping was - only, y’know, good – trading in that record’s morass of unfinished ideas for a whole fulfilled entity. The same is true of ‘Clear Water’s classic rock licks and cascading vocal harmonies that tickle the verge of high camp with a knowing wink.

And yet, for all its studied trickiness and awkward angles, Field Music (Measure) is deeply human at heart, at turns strikingly vulnerable – ‘Lights Up’s confession “How can I be sure / You won’t see the worst of me” – and aggressively decisive, during the muscular brawn of ‘All You’d Ever Need To Say’. And ultimately, this layered density, both musical and emotional, makes it a tough record to review. I can’t be sure that the album I’m writing about now will be the same album I listen to in six days’, or six weeks’, or six months’ time. But that’s certainly a large part of its appeal. For now, it’s enough to say Field Music (Measure) is a highly accomplished piece of work, one so crammed full of ideas and concepts that it’s impossible to digest in one round - and one almost certainly destined to mature like a good wine.

By Rory Gibb