For the last two years, Britain has found itself bathing in a new whirlpool of angular pop. While we await the new Arctic Monkeys album with a feverish excitement, we also find time to discover acts whose musical invective eschews post-Libertines riff-rock in favor of something less carbuncular and spiky. In this quest for renewed sophistication, we arrive at the delicious experimentation of Sunderland’s Field Music. The threesome – keyboard player Andy Moore and multitasking drum/guitar/vocal brothers Peter and David Brewis – name-checks influences as diverse as the Fab Four through to Thelonious Monk and on to Igor Stravinsky. Their latest album, Tones of Town, is a heady mix of carefully crafted music that sits somewhere between Kraut-folk and Steely Dan-styled melodic suss. “I want to play one of our records next to a Beatles record and not say, ‘Oh God, we’re shit,'” David Brewis told Mojo earlier this year. Tones of Town is that album. New British indie rock for those who know better.
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