As with any artist whose singular sound wins an admirable cross-section of hearts-- especially in a time when fewer niche artists are rewarded with attention from outside their scene-- it's hard to envy Axel Willner as he follows his debut, the 2007 breakout From Here We Go Sublime. Offer a complete revamp of his paradoxically mist-light-but-brick-dense mix of ambient and trance? He'd be accused of selling out his smitten fanbase. Pack Yesterday and Today with six slabs of self-parodic more-of-the-same? He could await the entitled mewling about wheel-spinning and diminishing returns.
So it's unsurprising that Willner's taken the easiest route. Yesterday and Today calculatingly comprises three songs that extend the known rush of Sublime-- the barely there hissing drums; the short, soft vocal samples swept into grandly corny pastel clouds; the poignant you-call-those-melodies? abstracted from the emotionally-manipulative fakebook of post-rave cheese-- and three very different potential future directions for the Field discography. It sounds like a hesitant record, made by a man stuck between the rock of new non-DJ expectations and the hard place of an artist's desire to grow without being compromised by an audience whose needs he can only guess at. It's also quite good, despite the possible failure of nerve on its creator's part.
Good or no, though, it's doubtful the new-old stuff will convince those un-seduced by Sublime. Willner's tracks are so formally simple that's it not necessarily wrong to claim that if you've heard one then you better dig a lot of edge-of-perception variations in woosh and chug to get through a whole record. But then the rickety claim that "there may not seem to be much going on but..." has tripped up decades' worth of critics trying to sell verse-and-chorus kids on bleeps and loops. Let's say this to the suspicious: If the sound-qua-sound of a Field track's first minute doesn't trigger near-synaesthetic glee, it's guff to promise any mind-rearranging revelations five minutes later, or even many of traditional minimalism's "holy shit!" moments.
The length of Willner's tracks, their did-he-or-didn't-he? shifts in mood, and their easy to miss addition/subtraction of instrumentation via the volume knob suggest background music, and maybe that's the best "in" to the Field's world. You can certainly let the a trance-ish synth swoosh and near-inaudible plinky piano of opener "I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet" (a subtle advance rebuke to peanut-gallery griping?) wash over you and be satisfied. Of course that might mean you'll miss Willner's genius deployment of a single rising chord in the final minutes. And if you've been gripped by "I Have The Moon" for its duration? Well, there's your nape-tingling bonus.
It's also not clear that the aesthetic curve balls will please Sublime partisans. Korgis cover "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime" is more or less a snooze, a looped line of (gasp!) full vocal over a dapple of static-ridden soft-pop and swelling strings-and-cymbals, a pleasant diversion as the B-side remix to an indie rock single, but filler here. Better is "Yesterday and Today", truly tweaking Willner's trademark and suggesting the fruits of the Field's cross-genre jaunt across America, rubbing shoulders with four-man bands in our finer rock-centric ratholes. The chunky, lengthy bass-and-drums outro thankfully sounds less like punk-funk and more like a tribal DJ tool from a Masters at Work set, albeit replacing MAW's gussied-to-hell layers of horns and chants with a nostril-dilating blast of pine-scented Kompakt ambiance.
But then there's the appropriately named, implacable, acid-tinged "Sequenced", a nostalgic cruise straight into the murky neighborhood of 1970s/80s Europe's half-remembered pioneers of O.C.D. keyboard-play as an end in itself. Despite the late introduction of a (there's sadly no other adjective) spangly melody, it's by far the darkest thing Willner's ever waxed. And though it features the album's most insistent rhythm, it's too slow for dancing, more like what a post-JDF producer would play during a casting call for his kitsch discosploitation movie. It's also the key to understanding why those who kvetch about the Field failing as "dance music" are missing the point. Like those repetition-happy German/French/Italian pioneers, the Field's making music more suited for passively-received images than actively moving bodies.
It's impossible to tell where Willner will go from Yesterday and Today. One might hope he continues on from the title track, adding weightier rhythms and making a few no-bullshit dancefloor singles. Or you can imagine a double-disc of deep-listening mid-tempo head-nodders taking "Sequenced" to prog/concept extremes. Whatever the evolutionary next-step, the hope is that Wilner can keep the feel of the Sublime-ish half of Yesterday and Today without stooping to third-time's-killed-the-charm recycling or willfully denying the pleasures he can provide so easily. That's the kind of tall order that's felled artists more time-tested than the relatively young Willner, and so for now I'll just wish him luck while very much enjoying the rich mix of retreads and possibilities we've got.
