So, as it turns out, Sunderland is not the new Seattle, what with leading lights the Futureheads and Newcastle-upon-Tyne neighbors Maxïmo Park pumping out less exciting variations of their much-celebrated debut albums, and the scene's dark horse-- oddball indie pop trio Field Music-- announcing their hiatus before their second album (2007's Tones of Town) had barely settled onto record-store shelves. But for fraternal Field Music leaders David and Peter Brewis, the end of the band does not mean the death of the brand. Citing a growing disillusion with the touring and promotional aspects of being in a band but a continued enthusiasm for the recording/creative process, the brothers have essentially split into two outfits united under the "Field Music Productions" banner: David was first past the post earlier this year with his boisterous new School of Language project, which closely adhered to its antecedent's post-punky guitar pop schematic, while Peter now emerges with the even more ambitious The Week That Was, whose assured self-titled debut ushers in the Brewis brothers' next phase in earnest.
Perhaps Field Music's most impressive quality was how they pulled off complex, multi-instrumental arrangements in a three-piece format; The Week That Was makes those grandiose intimations real with a formidable nine-piece line-up (including David in a supporting bassist role). Opener "Learn to Learn" begins with a booming repeated bass-drum/floor-tom pattern that acknowledges the lingering influence of XTC (cf., "Making Plans for Nigel"), but also serves as a telling harbinger of Peter's renewed aesthetic, in which traditional new-wave guitars and synths are de-emphasized to exploit the acoustic and percussive qualities of pianos, vibraphones, marimbas, cornets, violins, and, yes, cowbells. It’s an approach that was prefigured by Tones of Town tracks like "A House Is Not a Home", but given a more authoritative treatment here: the tick-tock clatter of "The Good Life" and the hypnotic, Congotronic vibraphone oscillations of the gorgeous "It's All Gone Quiet" prove to be perfect complements to their workaday narratives, while the stuttering, trip-you-up drum beat of "The Airport Line" makes the journey to its swooning chorus that much more rewarding. When the strings come in to soothe the staccato rhythm, the net effect is something like Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers as performed by Can.
Despite the more elaborate presentation, The Week That Was sticks to the Field Music tradition of packing a surfeit of ideas into a compact package, in this case eight songs and 32 minutes; even the inclusion of a seven-minute prog-like suite, "Yesterday's Paper", doesn't curb momentum, those omnipresent drum rolls propelling the song through its multi-sectional turns at a brisk clip. Peter’s songwriting sensibility places him squarely in a post-psych/post-punk tradition that's equal parts Colin Newman and Carl Newman, Robert Wyatt, and Robert Pollard, but the constant tension between The Week That Was' percussive and melodic elements means that, unlike Field Music, his new band can’t be so easily aligned with contemporary indie-rock acts peddling new-wave nostalgia. Never mind the retro-gazing moniker-- The Week That Was is a band you need to hear now.
