You Tell Me

★★★★ You Tell Me

MEMPHIS INDUSTRIES. CD/DL/LP

Peter Brewis from Field Music joins forces with Scots folk artist Sarah Hayes. The story goes that these two singers and multi-instrumentalists first connected at a Kate Bush gig and found their tastes overlapped. No guarantee of success, but this is a brilliant and original collaboration. Their voices have contrasting timbres and they produce some gorgeous harmonies throughout. The string flourishes on Foreign Parts, with Hayes on lead vocals, and the twitchy, funky Water Cooler, with Brewis to the fore, are sonically close to Field Music’s excellent Open Here, and You Tell Me is of comparable quality. But there are many different moods here, like Springburn, a ballad with Hayes’s rippling piano deftly decorated by Brewis’s keyboards, and Get Out Of The Room with sparse drums, strummed guitars and ominous horn samples. The album is – fittingly – based on conversations, and here the mood darkens, the vocalists’ relationship becoming tense.