For their eighth record, the English art-rock band Field Music have made a concept album about the aftermath of World War I, aka the 20th century. Originating at London’s Imperial War Museum, Making a New World begins with a song based on a graphical recording of the last shots fired in the war and goes on to cover everything from women’s suffrage and Tiananmen Square to the invention of the sanitary napkin. “A Change of Heir” is about Dr. Harold Gillies, who pioneered skin grafts for injured soldiers, while “Money Is a Memory” is about a German treasury officer preparing documents for—
You know what, I’m sorry, but I can’t. Who listens to pop music and thinks about stuff like this? How do they do it? True, World War I is a hot topic, with historical relevance to current nationalist successions and Russian shenanigans, not to mention 1917 storming the Oscars. It is interesting that Gillies performed one of the first gender affirmation surgeries, and that Germany paid its last WWI reparations in 2010. But I only know this from reading about the album, which I only did in order to write about it.
Music is the best way to learn about emotions, but the worst way to learn about facts. Without context, which Field Music’s medium can’t provide, you’re left perplexed by the obscure narrative perspectives and wondering why on earth these guys are singing about menstruation. The music, though lively enough, feels distant in its concerns. The album’s fussy construction, with lots of small instrumentals and half-songs, is tiresome. By the end, it’s hard to remember much of what happened.
To be fair, there are some good ideas here. Opener “Sound Ranging,” an interesting blend of beauty and terror, is one of the best instrumentals, with a beat like distant artillery fire. But there’s still the desultory throat-clearing of “Silence” before the record finally gets going with “Coffee and Wine,” which tenses and glides through a bouncy groove, sparkling politely, like the Clientele trying to be Franz Ferdinand. There’s plenty of slinky, string-bendy rock and junkyard percussion to come, much of it tinted with lemony vocal harmonies redolent of Africa, or at least of David Byrne. And when the Brewis brothers aren’t funking it up, they like to climb high into incomprehensible almost-falsetto regions, in prog rock’s “maybe this is a melody?” tradition.
Near the end, the short tracks almost take over: There’s a little synth interlude, a little piano, someone practicing a guitar scale for 30 seconds; it’s as if the album is crumbling away. Then, speeding out of the tuneless electro-rock of “Nikon, Pt. 2,” comes “Only in a Man’s World,” a big Peter Gabriel moment. “Why should a woman feel ashamed? Why, why, why?” David Brewis wails. “What kind of civilization/Has made the necessary/Conditions for procreation/A luxury?” He goes on to conclude, “Things would be different if the boys bled, too.”
This is patently ridiculous—not the idea itself, but him singing it, in this setting. This is a product of the gap between what the album purports to say and what it could possibly say about its subject matter, and here ridiculousness breeds. There’s a familiar, overriding sense of a couple of guys reading something about history and having a lot to report. If you don’t mind the idea of These New Puritans as your dad after a Ken Burns binge, you’ll find signs of life and creativity within Making a New World’s overall confusion. If not, no one could blame you for moving on.
Buy: Rough Trade
