Field Music, Commontime: 'Brothers back on form with fidgety pop that generates a smile', album review

Peter and David Brewis’s previous recordings have for me generally suffered from a certain studiousness, as if these clearly gifted brothers were moulding their ideas too forcibly, leaving a distance between intention and emotion. Feeled music, rather than felt music, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Since 2012’s Plumb, little has been heard from them save for Music for Drifters, a new soundtrack to John Grierson’s 1929 documentary about the fishing industry, Drifters. But huge changes have been afoot in the Brewis world, notably both men’s accession to parenthood. This has imposed not just a new set of priorities and responsibilities but also, it seems, a new outlook.

The new songs on Commontime, as the title suggests, appear simpler and less over-refined than before. There’s a greater openness to allowing tunes to prevail in

their most hummable form, unsabotaged by proliferating variations and sudden shifts of direction.

And along with that melodic accessibility has come a lyrical approach which by the brothers’ usual standards is almost blissfully open.

There’s still a wariness, a tendency to second-guess and worry about motives and meanings, but in general these new songs beam with happiness, rather than skulk in anxiety. It’s as if all the fretting over detail that used to be expended on their music is now being applied to their offspring, and music has once more become a source of pure pleasure.

Their new shared sense of fatherhood is most obviously reflected in songs like “Stay Awake”, an apology for sleep-deprived grumpiness, and “The Morning Is Waiting”, in which Peter reassures his son that “those who need to hear you can hear you”. Typically, it contains echoes of Abbey Road’s second-side suite – and just as typically, presents them as if filtered through Van Dyke Parks’ sensibilities.

Both influences are evident in other songs, too: the guitar coda to “Trouble at the Lights”, a song using traffic as a metaphor for character, echoes “The End”, while the string arrangement to “They Want You to Remember” has the flavour of one of Parks’ many evocations of antiquity.

“The Noisy Days Are Over” opens the album with a wry rumination on the patter of tiny feet, that’s like a less bitter version of Cyril Connolly’s “pram in the hallway”.

It’s characteristically itchy, fidgety pop – but unlike previous albums, the fidgeting doesn’t result in needless realignment of musical directions within the song; instead, they restrict themselves to a set course, not a million miles from XTC territory, with developments like the sax and trumpet breaks of the second half following logically from the song’s core.

The album’s other parenthood-related song, “I’m Glad”, takes a more brittle, Devo-esque approach, with an angular guitar break and brusque sentiment.

Elsewhere, songs like “Don’t You Want to Know What’s Wrong?”, “How Should I Know If You’ve Changed?” and “But Not for You” confront anxieties about the way things have turned out, both personally and politically, and the distances that inevitably creep into human relations.

The latter song is one of the few times when melody and harmonies occasionally threaten to wander too far from the point, but in that case it does actually suit a song about a relationship drifting apart.

It’s not entirely successful – “Indeed It Is” slips into prog-tastic, pomp-rock excess, and for funk, “It’s a Good Thing” is just too weedy. But Commontime is full of engaging ideas and genial character, by some distance the most assured and complete of Field Music’s releases.