Making a New World

AlbumJan 10 / 202019 songs, 42m 31s
Art Pop Progressive Pop
Popular

Field Music’s new release is “Making A New World”, a 19 track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels. The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath.” If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told. The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts - a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum administrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.

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5.3 / 10

The English art-rock duo’s concept album about history post-World War I isn’t worth taking half as seriously as it takes itself.

7 / 10

The Brewis brothers do what they do best on high-concept new LP

The brothers Brewis attempt to trace modern malaise back to WWI. The result is scattershot, with good ideas buried by a disjointed concept

Field Music already have the history teacher look nailed down — they’re no strangers to a cardigan and a tweed jacket. If any band, then, were to write a concept album about social reform in the aftermath of the First World War, it makes sense that it would be them.

6.4 / 10

There are enough ideas in the tank here.

Set in the years following the First World War, Field Music's first concept album explores many of the consequential effects, events, and circumstances that shaped both Britain and the world at large.

It ain't half pop, mum. Field Music look back in style – but even further back with the concept – on their seventh album of kinder, gentler music.

6 / 10

Here we are at the dawn of 2020 — Australia is burning, the oceans are bleaching and world war might be on the horizon: the culmination of a...

Sunderland’s enchanting duo, Field Music, are no exception to the rule with their seventh album Making a New World.

7.0 / 10

The recent 100th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice has led to a revival in popular interest in the period. English art-rock group Field Music added its voice to the mix with performances at the Imperial War Museum last year. The songs they wrote formed th

(Memphis Industries)

7 / 10

Starting life as a commission from the Imperial War Museum, Field Music's Making A New World is a subtle LP about the mundane consequences of war.

The band’s latest is an ambitious concept album about the aftermath of World War I.

7 / 10

Indie rock/progressive pop act Field Music have always excelled at creating ornately radiant, catchy, investigational, and academic sequences that capture...

The Brewis brothers’ concept album about the impact of the first world war brings left-field pop to topics ranging from skin grafts to period shame

Album Reviews: Field Music - Making A New World

The Brewis brothers’album looks at the after-effects of the first World War

Audacious concept album examining the still-extant ripples of World War One. Review by Kieron Tyler

8 / 10