I remember when this was all Fields

It seems so long ago that I can’t actually remember exactly when it was. But somewhere in the second half of last year I was driving back from my girlfriend’s one Monday morning, listening to Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC 6 Music show, when I thought I'd stumbled across a new single from Talking Heads, or at least David Byrne. The slightly awkward white funk was there, the somewhat strangulated vocal too, and most of all, an absolutely compelling rhythm. Rarely have I made note of the release date of a parent album on the basis of one single track, and so far ahead of time, but Hobbs’ declaration that Field Music’s Only In A Man’s World would be out on a full album in early 2020 was enough to chalk it up in anticipation.

So, here in the present, the album Making A New World has arrived, and it is a genuine delight, heard from a certain perspective. There’s a concept behind it, too, but I’ll come on to that later. My starting point, however, is as always the music: here the brothers Brewis have tapped into a veritable suitcase of influences, a subtle evolution of their last fifteen years making music with a discernibly old head on it. Whether the influences I’m about to come on to were conscious in the Brewis brothers’ thinking is not clear, but from the beginning of Making A New World there are some exceedingly comforting (to these ears at least) nods to the late '70s and early '80s. The aforementioned Only In A Man’s World is one of two songs which could have been companion tracks to the Heads’ Once In A Lifetime. Talking Heads were often regarded by sniffy critics as one of those ‘clever-clever’ bands, professional smartarses who produced songs with complex themes, complex structures, or complex instrumentation. Bands like Steely Dan, Supertramp, Genesis (in the post-Gabriel, pre-MTV days) and XTC, bands that wouldn’t fit any one categorisation - neither pop nor rock, New Wave, prog or anything else, even if the music press tried to pin labels on them. Well, guess what? There’s no shame in that. Which is why, lazily, I’ll end up resorting to comparisons when it comes to Field Music’s latest effort.

Making A New World is, according to the band themselves, “pretty much a concept album about the aftermath of the First World War”, which sounds ominously like another Roger Waters exorcism of the father he lost to German guns at Anzio but in fact, lyrically, the record is about the social impact of The Great War. Indeed, the album wasn’t meant to be an album at all, but instrumental elements of an Imperial War Museum exhibition about the conflict. That original staging plays a key role in the sequencing of Making A New World which, in the traditions of prog rock’s great concept albums, is a 19-song continuous cycle of tracks of varying lengths (from one coming in at just 41 seconds to the longest at just over four minutes), with a varying topography of time signatures driving the entire 42-minute album through a variety of tempos and timbres. This concept is not, however, what warms me to it, as clever a narrative as it offers up. No, it’s the musical return to the music I was listening to as I entered teenage that makes Making A New World so enjoyable. While it may be set in 1919, the musical tonality is set in 1979. From the outset, dark stabs of Yamaha CP80 piano recall Talk Talk, or Peter Gabriel’s glorious third album, while the vocals on Coffee Or Wine, Best Kept Garden and Between Nations immediately resonate 10cc (a band, by the way, deserving of far greater reflection - and, as an aside, I’m excited to hear that Liam Newton’s long-out of print book, 10cc: The Worst Band In The World, is getting a re-release next month). XTC’s Sgt. Rock appears, in spirit, on Nikon Pt.2, a 55-second coda to Nikon Pt.1, a brace of tracks which reflect on what happened to those who came back from the war in France. In fact, everywhere there are nods and ticks of familiarity. Whether by accident or by design, I don’t care, as the entire piece is just so satisfying.

Of course, if you naturally loathe concept albums, or the era of music I’ve referred to and the bands therein, then Making A New World, is not for you. But since I was schooled in exactly that music, this album didn’t just serve up a plate of piping hot comfort food nostalgia, but restored my faith that bands do still exist who can produce instrumentally rich albums that warrant a complete listen from start to finish, and can maintain the listener’s interest no matter what tangents it might indulge itself in.