Field Music - 'Field Music' (Memphis) Released 08/08/05

Long into the future, Field Music’s self-titled debut CD will sit its plastic grandchildren on its plastic lap and wax lyrical about the fact that The Futureheads’ ex-drummer used to play in its band, as did Maximo Park’s Tom English. Mackem/Geordie royalty, if you will. While The Futureheads get some life into their tunes, however, Field Music’s opener ‘If Only the Moon were Up’ is text-book uni student poetry with added jingles. There’s nothing like an earnest student to bring out the Crippen in you and that’s exactly what this track does, hopping and skipping all over the place like a leaden Morris dancer.

From thereon in it’s a downward spiral: folk-jangly pop of the type that’s done so well by Alfie but crushed to mediocrity by vocals that spend 37m 54s sounding unimpressed and vacuous which begs the question, if you can’t sound interested in what you’re doing, why should we be listening? It’s not 1973 anymore and we’re not going to sit at your feet making appreciative “ooooh” noises.

Where ’Field Music’ could have been lovely, it’s wooden. Sacrificing feeling for technique, it’s feyness for fey’s sake: wafting all over the place in a manner that was acceptable in the po-faced 70s but should by rights have been banned long ago. For something that makes serious use of handclaps and syncopated rhythms, this needs buckets of charm for it to relax enough to sound good. It doesn’t, alas, and plods along like a textbook answer to the question “How to do explorative folk in five easy steps.” There’s even someone twinkling bells for Christ’s sake. Bells.