Ronnie Hazelhurst (RIP) Are You Being Served? Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em Last of the Summer Wine The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin To the Manor Born Yes, Minister Yes, Prime Minister

Simon Brint (RIP) The Comic Strip Presents French and Saunders Absolutely Fabulous 2point4 Children The Lenny Henry Show Alexei Sayle’s Stuff The All New Alexei Sayle Show A Bit of Fry & Laurie Bottom Bellamy's People

Philip Pope Not the Nine O'Clock News Spitting Image Whose Line Is It Anyway? Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul Ted & Ralph Kevin & Perry Go Large

Peter Brewis Not the Nine O'Clock News The Young Ones Spitting Image Alas Smith & Jones The Lenny Henry Show Filthy, Rich & Catflap Smith & Jones The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer Quanderhorn

Howard Goodall Red Dwarf Blackadder Mr. Bean The Thin Blue Line The Vicar of Dibley The Catherine Tate Show 2point4 Children

4/30/23.

John Monroe & Field Music "Songs from the Shelf" is a collaboration of the aforementioned names. I'm not really sure who John Monroe is, but I'm guessing he is a fellow musician from Sunderland, UK. This is released on Daylight Saving Records which serves as a vehicle for the "extracurricular activities" of David and Peter Brewis as well as Ian Black (SLUG).

This really sounds like Field Music, which is understandable. John Monroe's vocals, melodies and song structure all sound like the Brewis brothers. And that's a great thing.

(Memphis Industries)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

You Tell Me, the self-titled debut from the new band consisting of Field Music’s Peter Brewis and Admiral Fallow’s Sarah Hayes, is an album about communication, or lack thereof. Thankfully, the musical communication is at a high level. A futurist folk record with infectious melodies, a sense of humor, a penchant for the dramatic, and inventive instrumental sources, You Tell Me explores what each artist does well.

Brewis and Hayes make the most out of both quiet and loud moments. Opener “Enough To Notice” ascends from silence to reveal crossing keyboard lines, pulsating and staccato, while “Get Out Of The Room” is sharp enough to balance acoustic guitars, harmonies, synth saxophones, clicks and snaps. You Tell Me explore various time signatures, aesthetics, and eras, whether the 80′s glam pop of bad office romance ditty “Water Cooler” or the baroque folk of “Springburn”. Their ability to compose and arrange contrasts their characters’ solitude and bad interpretations of each other. “You told me you were moving to Spain!” Hayes sings exasperated on “Springburn”. “We’re making memories,” she sings facetiously on “Foreign Parts”, not specifying whether the memories are good or bad for a reason.

It’s “Clarion Call” that’s the best song on the record because it’s the clearest and most honest. After a barrage of tracks that are quality but ambivalent, “Clarion Call” is Hayes’ tribute to pushing forward. “I can barely look after myself,” she sings at one point. But it’s the song’s eternal question of “If not now, when?” that chugs along its upbeat piano, synth harpsichord, and woodwind. The longest track on the album, it ebbs and flows, its journey a microcosm for the reality the characters face after they stop deluding and distracting themselves about relationships with others. Hayes may continue this deception--“Everything was meant, everything is clear,” she tries to convince herself on the stark “Jouska”--but at the very least, artistic collaboration is lucid and pure.

7.0/10

My job on this blog (for want of a better word - perhaps compulsion would be better) is to capture and bottle my subjective viewpoint and release it into the wild of the internet; sometimes I forget this and the blog sits dormant, gathering dust in a distant corner of The Internet. Today I have been moved to bring Bellow Baritone back from the brink of obscurity in order to examine Frozen By Sight, a collaboration between Maximo Park's Paul Smith and Peter Brewis of Field Music. 

Paul Smith has a rare talent; in his mouth the English language as I have known it for approximately 20 years give or take becomes new again. I tend to think of most singer/songwriters as musicians who happen to write poetry, but Smith feels very much like a poet who happened upon a guitar one day. His sense of narrative is intuitive and impeccable; this has been honed throughout his time with the Park, and it shines here in this transformation of travel writing, especially on 'Exiting Hyde Park Towers' and 'Trevone'. Much of his words remind me of the great observer William Carlos Williams and of one of his favourite images, that of the artist in the automobile, seeing and recording flashes of life before him. Smith doesn't only record, however; in the beautiful closer 'St. Peter's' he leaves us with a question: "When does a view become a view?" It's not a question I have an answer to.