Field Music… Keys to their success

Review: Field Music at Electric Ballroom

Published on October 18th, 2012 | Jonny Abrams

Prog – bombast + great songwriting = Field Music. It’s quite something to see David and Peter Brewis powering through monstrous psych riffs, sharing tender harmonies, clattering a drum kit with NASA-calculated precision, swapping instruments and onstage positions like some musical Xavi and Iniesta…and then acknowledging the resultant rapturous applause with a mild-mannered “thanks, nice one for coming out”. Clearly the Mercury Music Prize nomination they recently received for this year’s stunning Plumb LP has not gone to their heads, not that Rocksucker really expected the Sunderland brothers to transform into frothing egomaniacs overnight.

Field Music are living proof that you needn’t dress up and act like a total spiv in order to rock the socks off everyone and everything within an eighty-mile radius, and furthermore that said rock-induced sock removal can be interlaced with stately beauty worthy of The Beatles on Abbey Road and The Who on Tommy. Taking to the Camden stage to the strains of The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka cut “Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)” set the dial to ‘awesome’ before they’d even played a note, and the initial suite of Plumb numbers was reeled out into a set that did a decent job of ‘repping’ their four-album – six if you count David’s School of Language and Peter’s The Week That Was records, which this set list happily does – back catalogue.

Hopefully all this Mercury coverage will hoist the brothers Brewis into the limelight they so richly merit, not least because they would appear to be blessed with the kind of temperament and groundedness conducive to not suddenly turning rubbish. A renewed promotion campaign might delay the next step that their apparent work rate would likely soon have yielded, but my goodness we can’t wait to find out what it sounds like. Field Music are just as breathtaking in a live setting as they are on record, and the world may be finally taking notice.

Not sure what this is all about, mind…

Good gig tonight at electric ballroom – not sure we’ll be allowed back tho – the staff at the good mixer told us we were banned from Camden!
— Field Music (@fieldmusicmusic) October 18, 2012

Nevertheless…

Rocksucker says: Five Quails out of Five!

a quail a quail a quail a quail a quail

Click here to read Rocksucker’s in-depth interview with David Brewis of Field Music

Artists: field music

About the Author

Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.