English rock band Field Music (led by brothers Peter and David Brewis) are releasing a new album, Flat White Moon, on April 23rd via Memphis Industries. On Wednesday, they shared the album’s third single, “Not When You’re In Love,” via a video for the track. Andy Martin directed the video, which features images from old movies while one brother plays piano and the other sings the song from an old TV screen.
The band’s last couple of albums were fairly complicated, with this one they wanted to be a bit looser and perhaps, despite the pandemic upending live music, make something that comes off well onstage.
Not When You’re In Love is taken from the album Flat White Moon,
The album also includes “Orion From the Street,” a new song the band shared in January. Then when the album was announced they shared its second single, “No Pressure,” via an amusing tutorial music video that shows fans how to achieve the band’s signature sound.
Speaking of the album as a whole in a press release, David Brewis says: “We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about.”
Peter Brewis says he was inspired by Beck’s Odelay and De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising. “I love how they use samples on those albums, taking parts that are obviously played—that are gestural—and then reconstruct them.” “We don’t usually record a song thinking about how we’re going to play it live,” says David. “We’re not that kind of band. But there was a sense that it would be fun to do new songs which didn’t have those complications.”
“We say it all the time: You make music with your ears and your brain first,” Peter adds. “But I trust my ears and my brain, so let’s make something which just feels good and feels physical.”
In December, Field Music released “Home For Christmas,” a song for Memphis Industries’ holiday compilation Lost Christmas. They released their last album, Making a New World, in January 2020 on Memphis Industries.
Like so many of plans made in the past year, “Flat White Moon” started out as one thing and evolved into another. After the complexities of touring 2018’s Open Here, which required a bigger live band to cover the expansive arrangements, and then 2020’s Making A New World, which was performed as one continuous piece with a synchronised visual accompaniment, Field Music’s newest album began with the desire to play and to have fun.
On “Flat White Moon” Field Music takes on the challenge of representing negative emotions in a way that doesn’t dilute or obscure them but which can still uplift. The result is a generous record of bounteous musical ideas, in many ways Field Music’s most immediately gratifying release to date.
“We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about.” says David Brewis, who has co-led the band Field Music with his brother Peter since 2004. It’s a statement which seems particularly fitting to their latest album, Flat White Moon released on 23 April via Memphis Industries.
Sporadic sessions for the album began in late 2019 at the pair’s studio in Sunderland, slotted between rehearsals and touring. The initial recordings pushed a looser performance aspect to the fore, inspired by some of their very first musical loves; Free, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; old tapes and LPs pilfered from their parents’ shelves. But a balance between performance and construction has always been an essential part of Field Music. By March 2020, recording had already begun for most of the album’s tracks and, with touring for Making A New World winding down, Peter and David were ready to plough on and finish the record.
The playfulness that’s evident in much of Flat White Moon’s music became a way to offset the darkness and the sadness of many of the lyrics. Much of the album is plainly about loss and grief, and also about the guilt and isolation which comes with that.
We are delighted to share with you news of Field Music’s new album Flat White Moon, released on 23rd April 2021, featuring new single No Pressure and already out there Orion From the Street.
Peter and David Brewis have been releasing records as Field Music for over 15 years, and in that time a few things about their music has been constant: it’s all erudite and thoughtful, it’s all wonderfully melodic in a very “raised on Paul McCartney” way, and the music is performed and recorded with a clinical precision. Their best songs make the most of their raw skill and stoic formalism, and their more forgettable work strains against the limitations of their apparent repression and uptight musical inclinations.
“Orion on the Street” is definitely in the former category. It’s a song about death and mourning the loss of someone close, and it’s very much written from the “acceptance” stage of grief. The sorts of messy emotions that would characterize the other stages wouldn’t be the best fit for the Brewis aesthetic, but the brothers are exceptionally well suited to capture the graceful clarity of processing loss and seeing some beauty in someone moving on, even if you’re a bit agnostic on what actually comes next. A sparkly piano part and a very George Harrison-y lead guitar part are the most musically beautiful parts of the song, but the most lovely sentiment comes when they reckon with the notion of the afterlife: “Belief in further lives / separate, but true / if I thought you were anywhere / I would be there too.”
The band wrote: “Here’s the video for our new song Orion From The Street, put together by Peter and our multitasking guitar/synth/design whizzkid Kev. Cleadon Mill never looked so cosmic (except to those teens on shrooms back in the day)”.
A new, as yet unnamed album has also been announced for release later in the year.
So here it is. 5 years on, a new School of Language record. A concept album about the 45th President of the United States. Songs about Cambridge Analytica, Hillary Clinton, Rex Tillerson, North Korean foreign policy and the limits of the Goldwater Rule. This one is mostly a list of things Donald Trump has claimed to be amazing at.
I hope you all enjoy the songs, despite the subject matter, and the beautiful artwork by Elliot Elam, despite the subject matter. And, of course, I hope Western civilisation hasn’t crumbled by the time you get your copy. Hope to see you all soon on whichever School of Language or Field Music adventure comes next. Now I’m off to finish my new song, “On The Oranges of Species”.
It’s four years since Prince left us. Over these past few exceedingly odd weeks, I’ve been thinking about him; picturing him alone in the studio, running a drum machine through guitar pedals, layering vocals, churning out song after song, maybe with an engineer looking through the glass but nevertheless in a bubble of isolation. I couldn’t bring myself to cover his songs. I love the complete package – the playing and the production and the imperfections – just too much to tinker with. But I thought that maybe I could keep myself on the level by writing my own Prince songs. Maybe a little batch which would have been left in the vault back in ’81 because they sounded “too Prince” and he’d already moved on. So this is my little tribute, a digital EP called I Could Have Loved U Better available on Bandcamp as a pay what you like affair.
David Brewis of Field Music at his least collaborative. There were six years between Sea From Shore and Old Fears.
Britain’s Field Music (anchored by brothers Peter and David Brewis) announced a new album, “Making a New World”, inspired by the aftermath and repercussions of World War I, and shared its first single, “Only In a Man’s World.”Making a New Worldis due out January 10th, 2020 via Memphis Industries and features Field Music’s full live band in the recording sessions for the first time in a while. Check out the album’s cover art and tracklist, as well as the band’s upcoming tour dates, here. We’ll be playing both the new album in full and a set of what might loosely be termed Field Music classics . We’ve added in a show in Kendal, and we are pleased to announce Emma Pollock, Rozi Plain and Tenement & Temple will be taking it in turn to join us for these shows
Making a New World began when the band performed two World War I-themed shows for England’s Imperial War Museum at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The basic tracks for the album were recorded the day after the London Imperial War Museum show. While the majority of Field Music’s studio work has been put together by Peter and David Brewis, the one-day session featured Field Music’s full live band (Liz Corney on keyboards, Kevin Dosdale on guitar, and Andrew Lowther on bass), with Peter and David on guitar and drums respectively.
This is the first album since 2007’s Tones of Town that could be considered more of a full band album.
A press release describes the themes and inspirations of the album in more detail: “Making a New World [is] a 19-track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels.”
The jumping off point for the Imperial War Museum performances was, as the press release explains, “an image, from a 1919 publication on munitions by the U.S. War Department, made using ‘sound ranging,’ a technique that utilized an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence.”
David Brewis explains further in the press release: “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years, and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath. In writing these songs, we felt we were pulling the war towards us – out of remembrance and into the everyday – into the now.”
David also had this to say about “Only In a Man’s World” in the press release: “I found myself researching the development of sanitary pads – not a statement I’ve ever imagined myself making – and was surprised at how little the advertising material has changed in a hundred years. It’s still, ‘Hey Ladies! Let’s not mention it too loudly but here is the perfect product to keep you feeling normal WHILE THE DISGUSTING, DIRTY THING HAPPENS.’ And you realize that it’s a kind of madness that a monthly occurrence for billions of women – something absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity – is seen as shameful or dirty – and is taxed more than razor blades?! At every stage of making this song, I had to ask myself, am I allowed to do this? Is it okay to do this? And I cringed in the next room when I first showed it to my wife. But I think confronting my own embarrassment is a pretty fundamental part of what the song is about.”
Field Music’s last album was 2018’s Open Here. In May David Brewis released “45”, a concept album about President Donald Trump released under his School of Language solo side-project moniker. Meanwhile, in January Peter Brewis released You Tell Me, the self-titled debut album for his side-project You Tell Me (a duo with Sarah Hayes of Admiral Fallow).
Big news from FMHQ: We’ve accidentally made a new album – it’s called “Making A New World” and it’ll be out for your delectation in January 2020. And…err…it’s pretty much a concept album about the aftermath of the First World War. Wait! Come back! It’s not THAT kind of concept album! Honestly!
The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath. If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told.
The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts – a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum admi nistrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.
We’ve done songs about ultrasound and about shooting yourself for the sake of art and about gender reassignment surgery and about Becontree housing estate. We’ve even done a party tune about sanitary pads, called Only In A Man’s World, which is now streaming in all of the usual places (huge thanks to Lauren Laverne and BBC 6 Music for giving it its first airing this morning.) If you want Only in a Man’s World with a side order of facts about the invention of sanitary towels head on over to our YouTube now.
Only In A Man’s World is taken from the new Field Music album “Making a New World”, to be released on 10th January 2020.
Making a New World can be pre-ordered on limited edition signed red transparent vinyl, CD, cassette and download from our shop along with the first ever FIELD MUSIC MUG (which you can dry with the Open Here tea towel). The usual discounted pre-order bundles are available; just look at these beauties:
Tourdates : 9 Nov – Dundee, Neon at Night 01 Feb – Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery 21 Feb – Nottingham, Rescue Rooms 22 Feb – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club 27 Feb – Whitley Bay, Playhouse 28 Feb – Manchester, Dancehouse 29 Feb – London, EartH
The music of You Tell Me exists in this glorious place where several decades of British pop gently collide. That is to be expected considering the pedigree of the two singer/songwriters at the helm of this project. Peter Brewis is one-half of the flint-edged post-punk group Field Music, and Sarah Hayes has logged time in the glittering indie pop outfit Admiral Fallow and dabbled in traditional folk as a solo artist. Add in the detail that the pair met for the first time at a Kate Bush concert and the sound of You Tell Me may start coming into focus even before you get a chance to listen to their self-titled debut. The pair’s 11-song album weaves in and out of those varied sonic worlds with ease and wide-eyed joy, often grabbing little fragments into a lovely patchwork. Opener “Enough To Notice” layers the dreamy spirit of The Pentangle and their ‘70s psych-folk ilk with bubblegum pop, while “Water Cooler” and “Get Out Of The Room” imagines The Blue Nile’s sophisticated gleam meeting a hearty post-rock rumble.
There is a tendency within the running time of You Tell Me for the duo to maintain their cruising altitude for long stretches when they clearly have the abilities to hit the accelerator and soar. The languid pace that they lend to the majority of the songs here suits them just fine, but put up against the peppier numbers, you may long for a bit more variation.
At the same time, You Tell Me concocts such a spell with their debut that the journey will still delight and intoxicate.
The music of You Tell Me exists in this glorious place where several decades of British pop gently collide. That is to be expected considering the pedigree of the two singer/songwriters at the helm of this project. Peter Brewis is one-half of the flint-edged post-punk group Field Music, and Sarah Hayes has logged time in the glittering indie pop outfit Admiral Fallow and dabbled in traditional folk as a solo artist. Add in the detail that the pair met for the first time at a Kate Bush concert and the sound of You Tell Me may start coming into focus even before you get a chance to listen to their self-titled debut. The pair’s 11-song album weaves in and out of those varied sonic worlds with ease and wide-eyed joy, often grabbing little fragments into a lovely patchwork. Opener “Enough To Notice” layers the dreamy spirit of The Pentangle and their ‘70s psych-folk ilk with bubblegum pop, while “Water Cooler” and “Get Out Of The Room” imagines The Blue Nile’s sophisticated gleam meeting a hearty post-rock rumble.
There is a tendency within the running time of You Tell Me for the duo to maintain their cruising altitude for long stretches when they clearly have the abilities to hit the accelerator and soar. The languid pace that they lend to the majority of the songs here suits them just fine, but put up against the peppier numbers, you may long for a bit more variation. At the same time, You Tell Me concocts such a spell with their debut that the journey will still delight and intoxicate.
Mercury Prize nominated brothers Peter and David Brewis bring to the table a cinematic score composed to accompany Scottish filmmaker John Grierson’s pioneering 1929 silent film Drifters, which followed fishermen in the harsh conditions of the North Sea. The concept was originally commissioned by Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival a couple of years back, and audiences can soon experience the accompaniment to the documentary live in cinemas around the UK. Alternatively just pop on this silver coloured LP and let Field Music’s two sides of rhythmic instrumental wash over you.
The Fat Angel Sings 