Field Music Hope to Revive the Album Format

Posted on Feb 10th 2010 4:00PM by Jolie Lash
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Field Music, the Northern British outfit fronted by brothers David and Peter Brewis, will introduce their first album in three years on Feb. 16, ahead of a U.S. tour kicking off March 15 in Minneapolis.

The semi self-titled effort, 'Field Music (Measure),' is made up of a whopping 20 songs, and although it has been some time since the outfit last released a full-length under their Field Music moniker, the effort is no archival piece.

"We had a couple of songs floating around like, maybe a year and a half ago, but... the first ideas [for the album] started to go down in about April of last year and we finished at the beginning of October," David tells Spinner. "It was pretty quick."

While 20 songs may seem like a lot in the age of iTunes, compiling so many numbers on one record was an effort to offer the same kind of delight the Brewis' themselves still enjoy from hefty albums.

"People are [like], 'Maybe the album is dead. Maybe that's not how people are going to consume music any more.' It's why I consume music," David explains. "That's still the form that excites me most, so I want to keep embracing that, even if that's entirely anachronistic."

"I don't particularly want to sit and listen to a three-and-a-half minute song and then move on to something else," he continues. "I want to kind of delve into someone else's brain when I listen to music, and the best way to do that still is that 40 or 60 or 72-minute collection of songs that have either a mood or lead you through a succession of moods. That's just how I want music to be."

The brothers once again produced the effort themselves, working out of the studio and practice space they share with fellow Sunderland outfit the Futureheads.

"It's just us, just the two of us in a studio," David explains of the production process. "We would be a nightmare to work with anyone else. Me and Peter are so close and we've made music together for so long, we can discuss quite complex things that we're gonna try to do, not exactly in our own language, but using terms which we understand immediately and which would be quite off putting for anybody else who was there with us."

Field Music recently gave away two free song downloads from their upcoming effort -- 'Each Time Is a New Time' and 'Measure' -- via their website, and David says he hopes it offers listeners a good idea of where the record is going.

"The idea with the album was that it was going to be really, really varied and if we deliberately chose two tracks which we thought were kind of opposite ends of the spectrum -- one which is bizarrely blues rock and one which is quite light and [has a] kind of baroque string sound -- here's two tracks to balance it out," David says. "And yeah, hopefully remind people that we're still there and we haven't just been sitting around wasting our time."