Popular
music and classical composition are very rarely married. The very image of the
two locking hands evokes a sort of repulsion, like the current Miss Universe
locking tongues with a chess grandmaster. For London-based These New Puritans
however, it’s become a kind of formula that brought them unprecedented praise
for 2010’s Hidden, a very percussive
record uniting legato bassoon with pounding snare explosions.
For
Field of Reeds, the group’s newest
effort, they’ve switched focus again. Fully penned even before setting foot on
the studio threshold, the album begins with two eerie piano chords underlaying
a soundbite of a female voice surrounded by nature, keeping the listener
guessing (as is the band’s want), building into a woodwind almost-jazz crescendo.
Fragment Two possesses the same
off-kilter rhythm that proved so successful on Hidden - a single hand on ivory keys, smooth but jagged, in a
bizarre experimental time-signature.
The
strangeness is very much a feature of the record, as Jack Barnett’s gruff vocal
drones battle it out with jazz singer Elisa Rodrigues’ smooth, relaxed voice
for centre-stage. In all honesty, whether or not you “get” the method with which
Barnett uses his voice will likely define if this album will stick with you;
there is zero faulting the remainder of the music, as shown on nine-minute
masterpiece V, which could well be
the soundtrack to a black and white science-fiction film. Everything from each
individual piano hammer strike to organ drone sounds as though timed to the
nearest nanosecond, with each breath left to hang in the air.
It’s
far from easy listening. Dissonance is a staple, and Field of Reeds, much like its predecessor, does not shy away from
this. Chords that slightly fall out with one another, and vocal drones underneath
squealing string arrangements; Spiral
plays with the concept, with stabs of trombone, a children’s choir - what’s
more disconcerting than a children’s choir? - all over a bed of ebony and brass
nails. An aural monster in the shadows clinging to a concrete wall. Sinister.
Organ Eternal begins with an ostinato
that might have been plundered from Philip Glass, but like every song on this
record it has a twist in its tale, and gradually becomes a string arrangement
which sucks the tempo from it like an especially thirsty vampire. Nothing Else is as close to velvet as
the album will go, while Dream kicks
off with Rodrigues’ voice exploited to sound imperfect, in line with Barnett’s
own humanist tones. The last track, also the title track, emanates foreboding;
the vocal equivalent of pitch-black takes up the first minute or so, and
returns in places to punctuate a bizarre set of woodwind and percussive trills.
Field of Reeds definitely does not aim
to be easy on the ear, far from it, and in places it seems to seek to be the
opposite. Influences lie scattered through the music, knowingly or otherwise,
sometimes subtle and sometimes very obvious. It’s music crafted as art rather
than to pander to the listener, which isn’t likely to win them any favours
commercially, but they’re unlikely to care. One instrument on this album took
four hours to set up. One instrument is one of the three lowest bass voices in
the country. One instrument is a flaming hawk.
Now that’s a band into their strange.
Field
of Reeds by These New Puritans is out on June 10 via Infectious.
JS
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