Week That Was, The / S/t

Memphis Industries

The Week That Was is the debut solo album by Field Music's Peter Brewis.  Written and recorded in late 2007 at Field Music's 8 Studio in Sunderland, The Week That Was emerged from an imagined crime thriller dreamt up by Brewis and inspired by Paul Auster's labyrinthine storytelling. Brewis started writing the songs as if they were moments, instances of perspectives within this story. The story was left to fall away, leaving a puzzle of musical snapshots. The songs are the evidence in this particular mystery and the victims, perpetrators, and onlookers raise questions with familiar concerns. How does one deal with the fragments of information received via television, radio, the internet? How does one balance distrust for mass media with dependence on it? How does this relationship influence hopes and actions in real life? And finally, what would happen if one decided not to deal with it anymore and switched off the information flow by throwing away TVs, radios, and newspapers? The resultant anger, confusion, and sorrow details the week of Brewis's own enforced switch-off. This may be about as conceptual as he will ever get.  Musically the record is an expansive tribute, paying direct (and indirect) homage to the wildly ambitious Linn Drum and Fairlight experiments of Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, and Tin Drum-era Japan. Fused with typically detailed arrangements and a sense of drama, this makes The Week That Was a brain-shattering, 32-minute epic, straying far outside the conventions of most indie-guitar music.  The record features contributions from Brewis's Field Music colleagues, his brother David Brewis and Andrew Moore, along with Pete Gofton on vibraphone, Jennie Redmond on vocals, John Beattie on cornet, and Laura Cullen on flute, as well as percussive and vocal duties from This Ain't Vegas's Jordan Hill and Richard Amundsen. The strings were played by Emma Fisk, Peter Richardson (both veterans of previous Field Music albums), and Pauline Brandon. The success of the album, however, pivots around Brewis's deftness and ingenuity as producer, engineer, writer, instrumentalist, and singer--it's hard to think of even a handful of artists who would attempt to harness such a sprawl of ideas, let alone who could pull off such a project so astutely.

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