Album: Field Music - Making a New World

“Only in a Man’s World” is a snappy pop-funk nugget with an Eighties feel. There’s a kinship with Peter Gabriel and “Once in a Lifetime” Talking Heads. Its lyrics though are something else. They begin by asking “Why should a woman feel ashamed?” and go on to address why necessary items associated with periods are deemed a luxury by the tax regimen.

That Field Music’s seventh album proper is about more than its musical framework is made obvious by “Only in a Man’s World”, its 17th track. Elsewhere, there’s lyrics about the development of skin graft procedures and how they led to the first surgical gender reassignment. “Money is a Memory” paints a picture of the government administrator charged in 2010 with making Germany’s final war reparation payment, as stipulated in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Overall, Making a New World pivots on what continues rippling outwards from World War One. Not anniversaries, but actions, events and day-to-day processes rooted in what happened between 1914 and 1918.

Making a New World is a self-generated concept album – their 2015 soundtrack album to the film Drifters was a form of concept album too – and is in line with band mainstay David Brewis’s recent Donald Trump-inspired solo album 45, made as School of Language. However, this is a band album with its basis recorded during a pair of real-time run throughs in one day. All tracks are credited as written by the musicians heard: David, his brother Peter, keyboard player Liz Corney, guitarist Kevin Dosdale and bassist Andrew Lowther.

While Making a New World is less clipped and funk-indebted throughout than its predecessor Open Here and more warmly organic sounding than 2012’s Plumb it – notwithstanding the conceptual framework – sums-up the band to date. Fifteen years after their first release, Field Music have fashioned an entry point into their oeuvre.

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