In Stores Now: Field Music (Measure) by Field Music

Illustration titled "The Time Has Not Yet Come" from Steps To Literature II: Tales of Many Lands, 1910

So I didn't plan to buy the new album by Field Music, a band I have no past familiarity with, but (a) I found a cheap copy of it at the local record shoppe, (b) I have a weakness for double albums, and (c) I thought to myself, "This is a couple months old, but I could still count it as "In Stores Now"! I'd heard good things about Field Music, the Sunderland, UK band that released Field Music (Measure) in February, it's first album since going on hiatus in 2007 - comparisons to XTC and the Futureheads had me interested. Ultimately, I find Field Music (Measure) to be a confounding but still enjoyable album of skewed pop, but it lacks some of the immediacy that I was hoping for.

Over the course of its twenty songs, Field Music (Measure) does too much and also not enough. The album starts with a string of five strong songs, including a near-perfect acoustic pop song in "Them That Do Nothing", which undermines the theory that Field Music had no intention to delivery any straightforward pop on this album. The baroque-pop title track "Measure" is another winner - it's not as catchy, but it makes up for it with a pleasant melody and string arrangement. After this first salvo, though, Field Music fall into a distinct pattern that becomes tiresome. A song starts with a clunky thud-rock intro of some kind that segues into a nice verse melody, but the vocal element usually drops out before making much of an impression to make way for an extended instrumental passage of some kind. Most of the songs are under four minutes, but this structure makes them seem overlong without embedding a lasting hook in the listener's head. Of course, this doesn't work well over the course of a twenty-song album.

The arrangements come across as fussy a lot of times, and the contrast between the almost-twee vocal approach and the heavy classic-rock guitar sound doesn't really work. Could they really have been inspired by mid-era Procol Harum? I don't really know what else to compare this kind of prissy prog-rock to. My recommendation to Field Music is obviously pointless, but it would be to take the great musical ideas spread across this album and arrange them differently. There is plenty of good material here that could be reworked into a sequence of thirteen or fourteen solid pop songs. If they did away with the clunky-intro/brief-melody/big-jam structure that dominates the album, the hooks would come through more clearly and the album would make more of a real impression.

"Measure" by Field Music