A gazillion years after punk made atavism a realistic goal, indie rock fans remain justifiably skeptical of virtuosity. While even the Decemberists went sorta prog last year, Colin Meloy has freely admitted his inability to rip out a decent solo. Mastodon may be brutally chopsy, and Girl Talk has technical flash, but that's not what excites people about their music (at least, fuck, I hope not). When a record's sound is all that matters, degree of difficulty is a subject better left to music schools. Dudes, this isn't figure skating.
So why do Sunderland, England's Field Music conjure up my teenage crush on Kristi Yamaguchi? The trio's 2005 self-titled debut introduced these Futureheads associates' baroque brand of whirring indie pop, with enough time signature changes and clever hooks to evoke XTC. In a typical Field Music song, lead guitars pirouette into nervous piano notes, while lush vocal harmonies might jump up against violins. Their follow-up, Tones of Town, is just as brainy, almost as catchy, and even hits a triple axel or two.
Much of Tones of Town feels like more of the same, but Field Music obviously haven't just been listening to pastoral English pop. The bracing first single "In Context", which is even more invigorating out of context, kicks off with a heavy drum loop that could practically have been sampled from Nelly Furtado's "Maneater". ("I was expecting a change," dual lead vocalists Peter and David Brewis note forlornly amid ringing guitars.) With its heaps of distorted bass guitar, "Sit Tight" opens with staccato keyboard chords befitting Harry Nilsson's "One"-- but before long it's gone off on a Timbaland-esque mouth percussion tangent, backed by dreamy glockenspiels. This music is complex, but it certainly isn't stuffy.
Meanwhile, Field Music help make sense of their busy, self-produced arrangements with simple (if oblique) lyrics. "Living on your own is never very fun," the brothers Brewis proclaim on another standout, the percussion-happy "A House Is Not a Home". Elaborate opener "Give It, Lose It, Take It" strives for Beatles-esque aphorism, stating with melismatic irony that "all that you have is all that you need to be." For those getting lost, the Brewises sort of explain it all on raucous title track "Tones of Town": "The simple things are complicated." Hmm, is that some kind of Eastern thing?
After a debut mostly full of songs about love, Tones of Town focuses more on our endless numbered workaday days. Mid-album tracks "Kingston" and "Working to Work" complain about the mind-numbing tedium of 21st-century capitalism while tacitly acknowledging we probably don't, broadly speaking, have much to complain about. "The system we seem to know just doesn't add up for us," adds "Closer at Hand", which opens with a gorgeous a cappella harmony and ends up seeming like, well, a song about a girl. The trouble with so much complexity in pop can be that it comes off feeling like work; Tones of Town may lack the swooning immediacy of its predecessor, but it still sounds like a labor of love.
