Talk of the Town

Field Music's second album Tones Of Town won't be coming out in the U.S. until February 20th13th, but is available for download from emusic on its U.K. release date of Jan 22nd. Which is today.

For those who don't know them, Field Music is/are a three-piece band from Sunderland (home of the Futureheads and Maximo Park) with two brothers, Peter and David Brewis, who sing and alternate between guitar and drums (depending on who sings lead) and keyboardist/bassist Andrew Moore, who also adds backing vocals. I saw them play an amazing show at SF's Bottom of the Hill last March, before their debut album was released in the US. It was a rainy Sunday night, and there couldn't have been more than 30 people in the audience, but they won over nearly everyone over the course of their set.

That self-titled debut album was one of the best things I heard in 2006. It was billed by their label as "Wire covering the Beach Boys", which gives a pretty good description of their sound, if not an ideal one. Peter and David are brothers, with the same knack for vocal harmonies that the Wilson brothers had, but they sound more English, closer to Ray and Dave than Brian, Carl, and Dennis. The addition of Andrew's keyboard and strings evoke XTC covering the Kinks or the Zombies. There's also a northern soul feel to the vocals and a 70s prog-rock quality that sounds like Peter Gabriel-era Genesis without all the soloing.

Those influences from their first record have are all extended further on Tones Of Town. Nearly half the songs have been available online for awhile. The first two tracks ("Give It Lose It Take It" and "Sit Tight") are available on the Memphis Industries label site, a few more songs are streamable on their myspace site, the initial single "A House is Not A Home" (not the Bacharach song) was posted on fluxblog a couple of weeks ago, and "In Context" was released as a single late last year. These tracks are all great individually, but hearing them in the context of the album shows how they all fit together into a whole 30 minutes of brilliance.