Field Music / Tones Of Town

Memphis Industries

Field Music covered a lot of ground in 2006. The trio from Sunderland, England (songwriters Peter and David Brewis and keyboard manipulator Andrew Moore) toured the continent, playing with Belle and Sebastian, Architecture in Helsinki and UK compadres Maximo Park and The Futureheads, performed at both the Reading and Leeds Festivals, and traveled to the US where they were the surprise hit of SXSW. They also invented a dance craze (according to English tabloid The News of the World); etched one side of a 7-inch with a list of things you shouldn't do but probably already have; released a B-sides collection featuring a brief and inaccurate history of pre-Field Music experiments; and somehow found time to record their second album proper.  Whereas their eponymous debut was played and executed with care -- dryly produced, ambitiously skewed, multilayered, and engineered to gradually reveal intricacies over repeated listens -- Tones of Town pushes and scratches at the boundaries of their debut, moving in several directions at once, and taking big risks.  The band stretches and surprises itself on the cut-and-paste beat boxing of "Sit Tight," the Day At The Races harmonies of "Closer At Hand," the overlapped marimba and undiluted rock guitar of "Give It Lose It Take It," and the spiraling modular structures of the title track. On "A House Is Not A Home" and the album's first single "In Context," they might even be described as "funky" (albeit in a singular avant-mackem way.) 

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