Arable for modern times

Those individuals who, for shame, might have previously overlooked or underestimated Sunderland’s brightest comets, Field Music, finally sat upright in 2015 when Prince famously tweeted a link – twice – to the Brewis brothers’ spare and stylish single The Noisy Days Are Over. Certain clodpoles of this writer’s acquaintance greeted this revelation with bemused incredulity, as though their reductive, indeterminate, whippet-in-drizzle notion of the north of England and equally oversimplified vision of US funk/soul/R&B were mutually exclusive; as though the Club A Go-Go, Wigan Casino and Rod Temperton never existed, and as though Jimi Hendrix never played two songs in Ilkley in March 1967 on a stage constructed from barm cakes and dominoes.

Overstated stereotypes of northern grimness are more redundant than ever today, not least when the entire planet is enshrouded in bleakness – and the only reason we even mention it is because contemporary despair is, in large part, what Open Here seeks to confront and ideally dispel. The first thing that strikes you is an apposite openness of sound, achieved not just via thoughtful, spacious arrangements and due diligence at the mixing desk, but built into the compositions themselves, from the ground up.

Those oft-reiterated comparisons to late-period XTC, Steely Dan, 10cc, Todd Rundgren and, yes, Prince, are well founded – Field Music mash all of those buttons simultaneously – but this has less to do with pristine sonics or flanged pianos, and far more to do with a shared propensity for subtly-voiced chord progressions that drag you bodily down the path less travelled, a smartly ring-fenced rhythmic base, and lyrics that bristle with insight, empathy and intelligence.

Checking On A Message acknowledges the hollow horror of that referendum result – “I waited up until I couldn’t care less, I was sure it was through… now I’m checking on a message, wishing that it wasn’t true” – but its 12/8 swagger admirably refuses to have its spirit utterly crushed and irrevocably broken. Similar allusions seem to simmer throughout the tough and terse Goodbye To The Country: “I’m sure it’ll be good fun making money at your kids’ expense.”

If anything, the most recurrent motif on Open Here is a determined sense of realistic, measured positivity. Daylight Saving is a tenderly insistent, beautifully judged vignette in which exhausted new parents dream of recapturing quality time with each other: “We might get it back again; not now, not yet, but soon.” Pizzicato strings tiptoe around the narrative so as not to wake the children. Count It Up, meanwhile, is a pointed reminder: literally, count your blessings, and stop mithering. (“If you can turn on the tap and your kids can drink the water, count that up”.)

And, Jesus, those illustrative string, brass and woodwind arrangements (Time In Joy, Front Of House, Cameraman, the title track) are an architectural wonder. The last time such elements were so integral to the very fabric of the songs was arguably on Apple Venus, or The Left Banke Too. This is particularly applicable to the closing Find A Way To Keep Me – a slow burn which unfolds by degrees into an uncontainable burst of euphoric yearning, a melodic murmuration. Is it too early to call 2018’s album of the year?