Field Music: Music for Drifters | Album review

Music for Drifters
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Artist: Field Music
Genre: Soundtrack
Label: Memphis Industries

If any band can take on the challenge of scoring a 1929 silent documentary about a North Sea fishing expedition from the Shetland Islands, it’s Field Music.

The Sunderland band are architects of some of the most creative melodic art-rock you'll ever hear and although their soundtrack to John Grierson's Drifters holds off on their more unconventional idiosyncrasies, these instrumental tracks – built around guitar, shuffling drums, piano and organ – weave and bob with no little flair.

There is a playfulness to the motifs used on Village and Destroyers of the Deep, while Hauling and The Storm Gathers are the most recognisably Field Music-like to fans.

Watching it with the film is undoubtedly more effective, but even without the visual component this is a mostly engrossing affair.

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Field-music.co.uk

Lauren Murphy

Lauren Murphy

Lauren Murphy is a freelance journalist and broadcaster. She writes about music and the arts for The Irish Times