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.

Alternative truths: Elbow - Little Fictions

As I plummet towards my 50th year on this rock I can, like many my age, be prone to rose-tinted, nostalgic visits to childhood. One strong reminiscence is that of the dozy, cosy feeling on a Sunday afternoon just after lunch. In my house, that would have involved the requisite roast, accompanied by one of my dad's tapes of The Goon Show or Hancock's Half Hour (let me emphasise - these were recordings, I'm not that old...).

Afterwards, as the washing up began, the radio would come on, and the house would semi-slumber to something bucolic on Radio 2 (if memory serves me well, 'Cheerful' Charlie Chester's Sunday Soapbox ("With a box full of records and a bag full of post, it's radio Soapbox and Charlie your host!") followed by the Mike Sammes Singers and Sing Something Simple, before a polite request would be issued to turn to Radio 1 and the Top 40.

I'm reminded of this today when I listen to Guy Garvey's Finest Hour on BBC 6 Music. Not that the Elbow frontman fills his 60 minutes of airtime with whimsy and pre-pop easy listening. Far from it. It's just that Garvey's perfectly curated selections always hit the spot on a Sunday afternoon, especially when coupled with his mellifluous Mancunian tones. You could say the Garvey oeuvre is a warming, welcoming hearth.

Elbow aren't, of course, just Garvey, but the big man's inherent and endearing warmth is a key component of the total band effort. That band is now one less, following the departure of drummer Richard Jupp, but you could even say that, after more than a quarter of a century in business, they are still just hitting their stride. Yes, I know they've had soaring, life-affirming, anthemic hits, but Little Fictions is the album - and still only their seventh - where you feel that Elbow are fully comfortable in their skins.

For Garvey, personally, his own journey is reflected on this record: since Elbow's last (2014's The Take Off and Landing of Everything) he has ended one marriage and commenced another, and released a jazz-ish solo album, Courting The Squall, which appeared to address much of the turmoil of such events. Thus, one is immediately hit by a feeling of wellbeing from the outset of Little Fictions, with Magnificent (She Says) striking a keynote of upbeat goodness as it celebrates togetherness through a narrative of parental pride, "...my heart, there defrosting in a gaze". It sounds saccharine, but here is Elbow's magic - they can do this sort of thing without resorting to cheese or, worse, Coldplayesque bombast. Thus, the lovely Gentle Storm, with its understated chords, Casio keyboard percussion, and the unashamed, plaintive refrain "Fall in love with me - every day", is much, much better to hear than my wretched description is to read.

Later, even tackling post-Brexit national isolation on K2 ("I’m from a land with an island status. Makes us think everyone hates us.") and taking a swipe at Fleet Street there is a reflective warmth, rather than an acerbic froideur. But don't be fooled into thinking this is all down to Garvey: this album was a group effort, largely constructed in open writing sessions up in Scotland. That said, Garvey's fingerprints smudge heavily on the adorable Kindling, which closes the album, and which opens with rhythmic, Velvet Underground-like circularity and the painful confessional "Had a circular saw blade where I should have had a heart. I was trusted, I adored her. And I tore it all apart." This is, however, a rare moment of darkness on the album.

Scotland's role not withstanding, there is something intrinsically - if hard to fully pin down - redolent of northern England on this record. That may come from the dramatic, reverb-enhanced sound that has been the hallmark of Elbow's sound as well as that of peers and local friends Doves and I An Kloot. It's their native Greater Manchester, as if the wet, echoey, melancholia of cobbled northern streets has been sampled and programmed into the mixing desk settings of these bands' studios. This is, though, only an effect, as the overall 48-minute collection is one of eminently pleasing comfort, ideal for these troubled times.

Other influences are brought to bear: Firebrand & Angel chugs along delightfully with piano bass notes reminiscent of Talk Talk, whose more obscure songs are regular features of Garvey's 6 Music show. That same piano emerges of the tender Trust The Sun, another example of carefully weighted minimalism laying beneath more gooeyness as Garvey declares "I just don't trust the sun to rise when I can't see your eyes. You're my reason for breathing". The Velvet Underground return in spirit on All Disco, but not with their customary bleakness - here, in a more understated form, is the cigarette lighters-ahoy uplift of One Day Like This, but instead of a song about embracing the new, it's one of embracing reality, textured by Mark Potter's graceful, well chosen guitar notes. These are also a defining characteristic of Head For Supplies, which alternates between Potter's haunting strings and some wonderful choral arrangements.

Elbow might have been attached to the belief that they are purely a stadium band, despite the "alternative" tag. One Day Like This did that in one fell swoop. But in trying to dispel such thinking, one, single song on Little Fictions - Montparnasse - is all you would need to think differently. With its caustically stripped back approach, it is a magnificent, beautiful, even, piece of songwriting. Like a considered Miles Davis pause, or a single, ringing BB King note, it applies thoughtful minimalism to produce just enough fabric to hold together a declaration of love that, like so much of this album, is heartfelt, genuine and not a bit soppy.

It's always easy to declare a band's latest album their best, until you play it back in comparison with the previous work. But even given the general brilliance of Little Fictions' six predecessors, it's hard not to consider this Elbow's best yet but perhaps, though, for reasons you wouldn't have expected to appreciate.