FIELD MUSIC
VENUE IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM, LONDON DATE 31/01/2019
It’s fair to say that Field music don’t shy away from taking on big projects. They’ve composed soundtracks for multimedia events before, yet producing and performing a song suite that not only commemorates the end of the First World War, but then tracks its influence over the next 100 years of history is ambitious to say the least. The fact that they pull this feat off with intelligence, verve and humour is testament to their position as one of this country’s truly great contemporary bands.
Commissioned by the imperial War museum as part of its making a new World season, sound Ranging (the suite’s title) takes its name and inspiration from a technique used during WW1 that, much like a seismograph, captured the vibrations caused by enemy shelling and enabled the location of gun emplacements to be identified. Peter and David Brewis were presented with an image that showed the exact point at which the War stopped – one minute, all jagged peaks and troughs, the next a series of flat, parallel lines stretching off into the future.
Performing in the iWm’s main hall, with fighter planes lit in ghostly shades of red and blue hung over them, Field music begin with an audio analogue of this image, a rumble of simulated artillery and then a quiet passage broken only by uneasy, sonorous piano. Coffee Or Wine is the first song proper, and it’s one of the Brewis’ trademark avant pop antigrooves, its clock-like rhythm signalling the onward march of progress after the devastation. There’s some great shards of spiky but fluid guitar here, as there is on the following Best kept Garden. Field music’s live performance might be all about control and precision – there’s barely any movement from the players onstage, a back screen scrolling information about each song being the visual focus of the evening – but there’s always an edge to the music itself, as though it might explode at any moment. Between nations is a good example: Peter sings in near-falsetto over a nervy organ pulse, before the tension is broken by a thump of skronk verging on king Crimson.
The suite covers a diverse, fascinating range of subjects, from the influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people in the wake of WW1 – i Thought You Were something else – to the advancing cause of women’s suffrage in Beyond That Of Courtesy, which is punctuated by big, defiant chords and tribal drumming.
some of the songs are instrumental mood pieces, yet even these are taut exercises in atmosphere rather than just polite ambient washes. But it’s the vocal tracks that really impress: the clanking beats and rousing chorus of Do You Read me?; David accessing his inner Byrne on the tightly coiled, Talking Heads-like Only in a man’s World; the stinging, righteous funk of money is a memory.
Both sombre and joyous, it’s a quietly stunning achievement.