Field Music’s Stiff Prog-Pop Hampers Their Complex Concept Album
The Brewis brothers explore the impact and effects of World War I on Making A New World with mixed results
David and Peter Brewis, the brothers who make up prog-pop project Field Music, have spent the last few years reckoning with the history of World War I. In 2016, they helped compose the score for Asunder, an Esther Johnson film that centered on the director’s hometown of Hull, a seaside town frequently bombed by German zeppelins during that conflict. Two years later, the brothers were commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to create a suite of songs to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War.
The latter project, initially performed live at the Museum’s two outposts in London and Salford, has been captured for posterity on Field Music’s latest album Making A New World. The timing feels a little off with the centenary now just over a year in the past, but this bold, yet rigid work has a much bigger scope than Asunder. The war is merely the starting point for the Brewises, as they follow the waves of history and strife from the epicenter of WWI to unexpected places.
Some threads are easy to follow. “Coffee or Wine” is a lumpish waltz told from the perspective of a British soldier returning home from the front and dealing with a flood of mixed emotions. And “Money is a Memory” concerns the final $94 million payment made by the Germans to settle their debts from the Great War. “A procedural formality… bonds raised to rebuild democracy,” David Brewis sings over a Hot Chocolate-like R&B groove.
Outside of that, their purview gets wider and weirder. “Only In A Man’s World,” for example, is a synth-drenched ode to menstruation and the development of sanitary pads. Too, “A Change of Heir” pays homage to the doctor who performed the first gender reassignment surgeries. They feel like odd diversions, but with a little digging, the connections to armed conflict reveal themselves. Sanitary pads were apparently first made to help staunch the flow of blood on the battlefield, and the doctor in question evolved his techniques from providing skin grafts for injured soldiers. The songs themselves work just fine without those details but the added context gives a more complete picture of the Brewises intentions.