On Field of Reeds’ title and final track, Jack Barnett idly sings, “You asked if the islands would float away… I said, yes.” The answer comes back with a dead-eyed conviction that makes it feel as if Barnett has lost sight of the solid shoreline, something he'll definitely be accused of with These New Puritans’ third album. It sees the Southend group all but shed any assocations they once had with the wider rock world, reinventing themselves as a neo-classical ensemble. The result is an uncompromisingly self-possessed record whose intimate qualities shouldn't be mistaken for an easy listen-- in many respects, its clearest analog is Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. It opens with a Portuguese jazz vocalist, Elisa Rodrigues, singing a sparkling, barely half-remembered version of Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love With You”. As it ends, Adrian Peacock, who has the lowest known singing voice in Britain, unleashes an apparently bottomless vocal drone, sounding as if he’s humming along to a Sunn O))) song, while Barnett chants in phonetics like a tricksy goblin.
Despite releasing three markedly different albums over the past five years, the Puritans have earned the trust of their audience, allowing them to go wherever their iconoclastic spirit takes them. Their debut album, 2008’s Beat Pyramid, took the moony British post-punk phenomenon of the preceding few years and made it nasty, agitated, and wholly uninterested in emotive melancholy or accessible lyrical subjects. Numerology and olde magick were central, though good luck trying to prise much else from it. “You know I’ll be thinking this music’s symbolic/ This music is weightless, and when I sing, so am I/ You’ll be slashing at the air, describing nothing,” Barnett sang with deterrent glee on “Swords of Truth”. He's been equally oblique describing Field of Reeds. “I’m just putting one sound in front of the other and thinking about what comes next,” he told the Guardian.
Its follow-up, 2010’s Hidden, sounded like a strikingly, elegantly choreographed war, at once global and gothic with its destructive beats, mournful laments, and taunting vocals. And now, Field of Reeds is a stilled, abstract pastoral of sorts, where the music seems to grow and swarm as naturally as moss across rocks. Its closest modern peer might be Julia Holter's equally pristine Ekstasis. Where Hidden traded in damning impact, Field of Reeds uses Barnett’s self-taught compositional prowess-- and the borrowed skills of composers André de Ridder, Michel van der Aa, and Hans Ek-- to explore the effects of memory, requiring investment on the listener's part, too; “Spiral” seems to repeat a clarinet motif from Hidden; “Organ Eternal” rekindles the glassy pulse of “V (Island Song)” with the resonator piano, a riff that in turn strongly recalls “Tubular Bells”.
Field of Reeds was recorded over 12 months in three different studios. The drums were added around structures determined by the strings, horns, and magnetic resonator piano-- a haunted, silvery-sounding creation-- and barely appear at all in the album’s final third (Barnett has suggested there are three movements here). Somehow, the effect is more intimidating than the parts on Hidden where they smashed melons to simulate crushing a skull. The spareness and sense of space on Field of Reeds is remarkable, the kind that'll make you glance over your shoulder as beguiling mercury-slicked glows slip into an overwhelming, sometimes vicious sense of anxiety; "There is something there," as Barnett sings on "Fragment Two".
These shifts are made even more unsettling by the lack of aggression in the playing; where Hidden’s M.O. could be found in “Attack Music”, on Field of Reeds there’s the sense that these glowing clarinets and strings are occurring naturally, almost as if emanating from a landscape. Gone too is the obtuse vocal phrasing that ran through Beat Pyramid and Hidden; Barnett has talked about spending “hours going through each sentence of the lyrics getting rid of all the consonants,” a defamiliarizing effect that makes his lines as slippery and memory-foxing as the dream-speak in “Twin Peaks”. It's as upsetting too; Field of Reeds' quiet lyrical narrative seems to follow a period of loss; first a person, and subsequently, trust in any kind of concrete meaning, underpinned by the way lines disintegrate into phonetic babble. As his fastidious techniques show, Barnett is a total perfectionist-- he proudly made George play 76 drum takes on one song-- yet his control freakiness hasn’t killed the record; the effect is naturalistic, and often deeply moving, rather than in any way inert.
While Field of Reeds is a mysterious album in many ways, what it makes clear is Barnett’s faith in the purity of sound, rather than words, to communicate; remember, "This music is weightless, and when I sing, so am I." By removing any imposition of context, his words of consonants, his music of attention-grabbing impact, his ensemble of rock band-status, he’s created a truly strange and beautiful record. Whether Barnett makes it explicit or not, These New Puritans’ songs have always been concerned with their South-Easterly corner of the coast, the smoggy bowel of London where rusting World War II fortifications stand demilitarized among the islands, just like the sounds on this album. “Secret recordings were made in the marsh,” Barnett chanted on Hidden’s “We Want War”. It feels as though he finally trusts us to hear them on Field of Reeds.
