Field Music's Plumb

This incredibly inventive album plays like a 36 minute suite over fifteen short songs. The album flows so smoothly that at times it's almost impossible to tell where one songs ends and another begins - of course this is made more difficult by each song packing in more melodies and ideas into under three minutes than most bands manage in a lifetime.

I recently - and rather crudely - described Field Music to a friend as being the missing link between The Futureheads and Fleetwood Mac, a comparison that I'm sure many will dispute, but it served it's purpose and there is some truth in those reference points, I just omitted a hundred other bands that spring to mind when listening to this album, such as Supertramp and XTC and the Beach Boys and Calexico and Foals, and...err..Marillion circa Misplaced Childhood. Oh, and Field Music too, because, despite the eclecticism that is on display here, there's something incredibly unique in this music that makes 'sounds like Field Music' a valid reference point.

The album comes on lovely 'plum' (yes, yes, very funny) coloured vinyl and sounds fantastic - as the sleevenotes say 'in order to preserve sonic fidelity, this record has been mastered using significantly less compression and limiting than most contemporary records. For your maximum listening pleasure, please turn your stereo system UP!'. Not that this will be of concern to most fans of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (if you want to know what I mean by this, read the chapter on 'The Story of the Band That Clipped Itself to Death' in Greg Milner's superb book "Perfecting Sound Forever").

Oh, and if you buy it from Piccadilly Records in Manchester now, it comes with a lovely exclusive free 'studio sessions' 7 track CD.