The Review That Is

The Week That Was
The Week That Was
Memphis Industries, 2008
3.5 stars

So far the disbanding of Field Music has produced two impressive offshoots - School of Language and now The Week That Was - and that's only two-thirds of the original line-up accounted for. Field Music had a knack for crafting impeccably tidy, impossibly clever tunes, the main credit for which clearly goes to the two Brewis brothers Peter and David. While David’s School of Language debut was like a third Field Music album, Peter’s The Week That Was, a concept-album of sorts, takes that band’s intricate, artful and almost mechanical approach to pop music and pushes it toward ... musical theatre. While Field Music’s songs would often change direction three or four times in three or four minutes, they always seemed to make it out of their musical maze in the same shape in which they went in. This time around that’s not the case. Combined with that unmistakeable Sunderland accent, the schizophrenic Yesterday’s Paper might as well be the score to Paddington Bear: The Musical. And listening to tracks such as the kinetic The Airport and album standout The Good Life you’d swear Brewis must plot his music on big sheets of graph paper, it’s that mathematically complicated. But even if The Week That Was isn’t everyone’s cup of earl grey, it definitely bodes well for the future of the Field Music team, both together and independently.

Artwork: C
A photo of a bunch of neat looking Brits staring at a TV with some Helvetica Neue over the top. Groundbreaking. It's neat (the inside photo pinpointing all of the contributors is quite nice) but, I don't know. Maybe a little too neat for my liking.

Published in mX, Thursday November 20, 2008.