On Field Music’s 2012 album Plumb, every guitar strum and every change in time signature was a musical deke that kept co-leaders David and Peter Brewis at a safe distance. The brothers' previous album, Measure, was similarly insular only double the length. Peter expanded on that concept with his solo project, The Week That Was, with nine musicians dotting his songs with sundry accoutrement. Meanwhile David’s first solo album as School of Language worked in headier spaces, deconstructing digital textures and power pop into impossible-to-perform tracks that exist more as a thought experiment than something he could pull off live. Well, David has finally lets his guard down with Old Fears, an album that recalls the words of the great guru George Clinton: “funk not only moves, it removes, dig?”.
Okay, sure, you won’t mistake a Field Music solo project for a lost P-Funk album. But when the first sounds of the record nod to both Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and Duran Duran’s “Notorious", you get a sense of where Brewis is coming from. On the surface, these songs have all the trappings of oblique art-pop, but the music is at its core an homage to the crisp edges of late 1970s funk and early 80s R&B—Dirty Projectors meets Dirty Mind. It’s a sly pivot that feels as clever as only someone from Field Music can be. But Old Fears brings you closer to Brewis by clearing away the clutter around him, leaving him singing about young anxiety and young love against mannered proto-funk.
The album’s loose concept draws from Brewis’ collegiate days. With so many touchpoints from the 80s, Old Fears plays like a nostalgic fever dream of someone who just had a breakthrough at therapy. The clipped swing of “A Smile Cracks” could inspire some starchy dancing, but the song is mainly about the affectations Brewis used to adopt as an up-and-coming intellectual. The wordless hook on “Dress Up”—just a carefree synth/guitar unison melody—is the very picture of a block party in the golden-hour of the afternoon, but all the while Brewis sings of his unwillingness to be social. Every song hums and vibrates along on a few different wavelengths.
Brewis’ history as a detail-oriented composer makes Old Fears such a simple album that it could, by most definitions, be considered a collection of demos. But it’s overlaid with a fine layer of psychedelic atmosphere, something filmic and out-of-time, which makes these songs waver in the mind like the memories he recalls. As the 35-minute album bounds on, tight pop-funk fades into more ambient worlds. The final ballad, the serene “You Kept Yourself”, closes with Brewis doing his best R&B impression over an Eno soundscape marked by blurry 4 a.m. guitars and one of those sax solos ripped from popular songs by Quarterflash or Gerry Rafferty. It is the sound of slouching home from the college pub, one of those ones where Brewis spent his time falling in love, and it feels like the one memory he wants to hold on to in the present.
Part of Brewis’ duty in Field Music was to keep them from veering over the edge into too busy AOR prog, and he uses that same keen ear to keep Old Fears from becoming too cute or kitsch with the tweed-funk. Instead of multi-tracked baroque chamber pop, he puts the same attention into only the four or five instruments. There’s hardly ever more than a spacey synth bass, some gated drums, a guitar riff, and Brewis’ buttoned-up falsetto; rare does a pop album have this much depth, especially one that used so few tools to dig it.
