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.
Like the best teachers, their enthusiasm is infectious on Making a New World, which touches on everything from gender reassignment surgery to the League of Nations. As ever, their songcraft is strong enough to support weighty themes — the ridiculously hooky Money Is A Memory just happens to be about reparations agreed in the Treaty of Versailles, while Only In A Man’s World is an irresistible funked-up jam about the invention of the modern sanitary towel.
The Sunderland band — essentially brothers David and Peter Brewis — have been making intelligent and pastoral pop with a quintessentially English sensibility for the past 15 years, and the studious subject matter here makes perfect sense. Best Kept Garden is packed with the kind of intricate, wonky riffs they specialise in, only this time they’re singing about town planning acts of the Twenties.
They’ve taken the unsexiest subject matter and made it sing — we wouldn’t expect anything less.
