Sorry Mr. President, but for a moment, let’s forget The Audacity of Hope. I want to talk about the audacity of longwindedness. It takes a lot for a band to stand up and say, “Hey guys. I know you’re used to an album usually lasting between 40 and 50 minutes, but we’ve got an hour and 12 minutes of material here, and we’re gonna make y’all listen to all of it.” To me, that’s pretty audacious, and I’ll tip my hat to it. That is, if it’s got something real to offer.
With their third LP Field Music (Measure), UK’s Field Music certainly seem at no shortage of material to put forth. “Them that do nothing make no mistakes,” refrain brothers Peter and David Brewis on “Them That Do Nothing,” the record’s second track. Maybe it’s their mantra. Following FM’s vastly more concise 2005 self-titled debut and 2007 follow-up Tones of Town, as well as solo releases from each of the Brewis bros. (David’s Sea From Shore as School of Language and Peter’s self-titled The Week That Was record), (Measure) is a triumphant return to Field Musicianship from an announced hiatus in 2007. After losing bandmate Andy Moore to his chef career and adding both guitarist/keyboardist Kev Dosdale and bassist Ian Black, the group seems determined to do everything, perhaps to a fault; the double album spans 20 individual and largely unrelated songs. Mistakes be damned, Field Music go everywhere on (Measure) — that is, as long as it keeps within the band’s already-established sound.
For this record, the Brewises again borrow generously from late-60s and early-70s psychedelic rock (not to mention the first British Invasion), all pervasive vocal harmonies, whining guitar tones, bouncing bass, and crisp, dampened drumming. Augmented by the occasional string section, it’s another entry in the vintage-inspired music canon, and it’s hard to say whether that’s good or bad. Strange how a whole generation of people can be nostalgic for an era they never witnessed because they weren’t born yet. We remember these sounds because we were shown them as precious pieces of our collective past. It’s nostalgia building upon nostalgia, a great meta-remembrance, and music like this somehow still feels like home.
So, there’s nothing wrong with using that great musical zeitgeist as a jumping-off point; it’s just that Field Music’s apple fell closer to the tree than most. “All You’d Ever Need to Say,” for example, revolves around a melodic bass line that sounds like both the bottom-heavy guitar workings of Led Zeppelin and a funk version of the soundtrack to dungeon levels of Super Mario Bros. Sauntering 5/4 ballad “The Rest Is Noise” features dueling psychedelic guitars over shiny rock piano straight out of a David Bowie/Freddie Mercury collaboration. But people still cleave to classics, and as such most of the record’s songs on their own succeed easily.
Unfortunately, though, (Measure) still falls a little short of subverting the ‘quantity over quality’ expectation I naturally attach to albums of such length. If more of the record proved truly necessary than I had initially anticipated, plodding, repetitive numbers like “Lights Up” and “First Comes The Wish” almost certainly qualify as filler and aren’t strictly necessary to the album’s aesthetic statement. They’re audacious because they’re superfluous. What’s impressive is how little of the album can be categorized in that way; Field Music has made very sure there’s a little trick or twist in each composition, proving its right to be where it is. What’s more, no song asks too much, as only the first and last tracks last longer than four minutes. Even the ambitious bits are individually terse; “Choosing Numbers” plays like a tropical gypsy interlude complete with swooning cello before it blossoms into an easy rock anthem, all in only two minutes, two seconds.
All in all, the Brewis bros. have done an admirable job of taking soundscapes that are purist, reverent, and uncreative and twisting them at least 30 degrees to the left, creating (though it may not be obvious at first) a reason for them to be. The rhythmic breaks in the songs — dropped beats (“You And I”) and polymeter (“Clear Water”) the likes of which I usually associate with metal or math rock — ultimately save Field Music (Measure) from banality. So yes, it’s an audacious album. It’s long, broad, and sonically, not terribly varied. But the thing about asking a lot of people is that they’ll rise to the occasion. If “them that do nothing make no mistakes,” then Field Music have set themselves up to be doers, and to learn along the way.