Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 02/04/07
Label: Atlantic

Last year's "Songs From The Fields" EP was an untrumpeted yet bedevilling affair, showcasing this Brum quintet's mesmeric sound. Fortunately their debut proper sees them fulfilling such early promise. Opener "Songs For The Fields" is amongst the best intros to an album you're likely to hear all year. A mournful folk riff is complemented by the tight and emotionally sparse harmonising that Silver Apples used to deal in, with faint but effective touches of bucolic psychedelia, before a crashing landslide of heavy shoegaze guitars tautens everything to near breaking point.

Young favourites at such shindigs as the Green Man Festival, Fields are far too imaginative and shape shifting to really fit comfortably inside the "New Folk" tag. Thorunn Antonia (daughter of the composer of the Icelandic national anthem) adds sumptuous exotica to the group not because of her geographical birthplace or elfin good looks but because of her stony, almost extraterrestrial vocals. Strangely enough, she has the same detached yet sexualised tone as Nico, Bridget Bardot or Jane Birkin; albeit with extremely different delivery.

What could have proved to have been an absolutely disastrous choice of producer has turned out to be an unexpected bonus as well. Michael Beinhorn has long worked in an idiosyncratic form of ultra analogue tape recording, which tends to favour bass heavy rock and metal acts such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ozzy Osbourne and Soundgarden, but has actually ended up doing wonders for Fields. There are hectares of space on quieter, acoustic tracks, clinical attention to FX detail and a satisfying grind on heavy sections.

Single "Feathers", as with other tracks, (despite what other cloth-eared fools might claim) sounds nothing like My Bloody Valentine but more akin to mid-period Ride or House Of Love. There are folk-y counterbalances in tracks such as "Schoolbooks" but for the most part Fields are, thankfully, retreating away from the finger in the ear crew, who had seen them as an uneasy ally for a while last year. This said, closer "Parasite" is unusually beautiful, calling to mind what could/should have been New Jersey duo, Joy Zipper.

But for the most part Fields are lazily picking their own way between the disparate pastures of folk, pop, post rock and shoegaze on a deliciously sun-dappled day.

    by John Doran