Good grief
Sunderland siblings refract the ache of loss through baroque pop rock. By Tom Doyle.
Field Music
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Flat White Moon MEMPHIS INDUSTRIES.
CD/DL/LP
THE BREWIS brothers, Peter and David, are nothing if not grafters, as underscored by their 2010 single Them That Do Nothing and its rallying cry to “get your keys and get to work”. Years of devout independence and dogged lo-budget touring have never slowed them down, and so it is no surprise to find that neither did a global pandemic.
Flat White Moon, their eighth album, was started pre-spring 2020 lockdown and then completed by the pair while separated in isolation. Their initial plan had been to simplify their sound – in the wake of 2018’s Brexit-gnarly Open Here and last year’s World War I aftershock-themed Making A New World
– and in many ways it finesses the styles of early Field Music (at least in their polyrhythmic, carefully-layered production world).
Continuing to pull off the trick of overtly displaying their core influences (1966-67 Beatles, Free, XTC) while sounding like no one other than themselves, their multiinstrumental and self-production skills shine here more than ever. No Pressure is the kind of stripped funk that attracted Prince to endorse them (although here it sounds like it’s played by Big Star), while In This City imagines a world in which Stevie Wonder jammed with Talking Heads, as Revolver-era George Harrison guested on guitar. Elsewhere, they evoke two eras of Fleetwood Mac in two different songs – the breezy strumming of Lindsey Buckingham in Do Me A Favour and the tangential blues of Peter Green in Meant To Be.
Thematically, the Brewises have declared that Flat White Moon is concerned with “loss and grief” and “the guilt which comes from that”. There are a lot of absences in these songs: the individual in Out Of The Frame who always ended up on the periphery and so is missing from photographs. The woman who is “impossibly far away” in the Sgt. Pepper-ish Invisible Days. The lonely, but hard-to-reach figure in Last Time You Heard From Linda, whose sad retreat from the everyday is rendered in an inventively baroque arrangement that sounds like an old 45 of XTC’s Senses Working Overtime being played at 331/3 rpm.
Best of all is soul-stirring opener Orion From The Street, with its re-angling of the Tomorrow Never Knows beat, rubbery bassline and twinkling constellations of treated piano loops, as Peter Brewis memorialises someone with whom he clearly had a complicated relationship. Here the ache of incomprehensible grief is succinctly and movingly summed up in two short lines: “To never meet again/Forever long to see.”
Always wholly impressive, Field Music’s brilliance has become undeniable with Flat
White Moon. Having grown in style and confidence with each album and displayed a flair for charting life’s ever-changing weather patterns, here they do so with real, deeplylived insight and dazzling pop expertise.