If you’re a musician, you are blessed, and I yield to no one in my desire to doff my hat extravagantly in your direction. I am wildly in awe of you, and you should sit back in the knowledge that you have achieved something magnificent.
If you’ve tried and failed (abjectly) to learn how to play an instrument, that’s ok, come here, let’s cuddle up and listen to the new David Brewis record. Let’s marvel, open-mouthed together and just enjoy the presence of greatness…
David Brewis
Although something of an arriviste, I’ve followed Field Music for a good few years now, seen them often and bought into the brothers’ various side-projects. It’s always been a rewarding if occasionally prickly experience. They are consummate musicians and spread themselves thoughtfully across a variety of different instruments – anyone who’s seen them play will have noted the bewildering transitions between songs, the swapping of instruments, the picking up differently-tuned guitars, the switching of seats around the stage. You do wonder at times if someone will be out when the music starts…
But I don’t remember any of their ventures being as instantly catchy as David Brewis’ most recent effort, The Soft Struggles. You’ve got to put this down to Brewis’ deciding that for this record he would learn to play the stand-up bass (as you do). This has traditionally been the smoky territory of goateed jazz musicians in porkpie hats – a forbidding enclosure, fenced off by razor wire and gaudy Keep Out signs – and is by all accounts quite a tough instrument to get on with.
Listen to Brewis explaining his travails to Mark Riley – it’s interesting:
Nick Drake, Astral Weeks and Danny Thompson are, of course the glorious exceptions to a rule that you ignore at your peril (we have short memories, these days, but does anyone need reminding of Sade?). No one needs to worry however; Brewis does of course pull it off in spades and his playing infuses the album with a busy warmth – one of the winning features of Field Music in general.
It’s a lovely, lovely record. One after another, a series of beautifully formed creatures jigs up and down in front of you like a series of togged up wedding guests arriving for the ceremony with their pre-planned routines executed prettily before they take their places in church.
But at the same time not crap.
The soft struggles are deftly dealt with in songs like “Tomorrow”, “It Takes a Long Time” and “Start Over”. As Brewis says the daily struggles are ones of “not being an idiot” and his self-effacing way of dealing with the universal day-to-day issues of dragging yourself out of bed and fronting up, is warmly forgiving and massively validating.
Here’s “Start Over” from the same Mark Riley session:
Brewis is supported (of course) by brother Peter on drums and percussion and by Sarah Hayes, whose contribution is substantial, singing on two tracks and adding piano and flute. Trombones, saxophones, cellos, violins and (most charmingly of all) a clarinet all make deft appearances over the ten songs – all of them at the right moment and none of them out-staying their welcome. It’s beautifully fashioned.
“Start Over” is also one of the tracks that demonstrates another side of the almost annoying brilliance of the brothers (if they weren’t such lovely chaps, that is). There’s quite a tension between form and content:
How many times
Have you stopped
And thought
I do not have the strength
To carry on?
World-weary lines are delivered to the disarmingly light rhythms of a waltz. Similarly, the wry and slightly acid portrayal of a local socialite in “Keeping Up with Jessica” (“Will you forgives us when we can’t quite keep up with Jessica?”) is performed over a feathery Bossa Nova.
It’s all rather elegant… I’m not finished with this record.
Greatness.
Partly Porpoise 