With their upcoming new album, Making A New World, the North East’s finest musical collective offer a nineteen track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. However, Field Music‘s new release isn’t about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and, as with their latest single, sanitary pads.
Tackling a poignant and relevant subject, ‘Only In A Man’s World’ is filled with whirring synths and funk-fused hooks, as Field Music’s trademark sweeping harmonies and distinctive jangly uplifting energy flows. Addressing how little the marketing of sanitary products has changed in the last hundred years, and the unfair taxation of what is an essential item for half the population, as front man David Brewis implores “Why should a woman feel ashamed…?”, it offers a refreshing and musically rich insight into our unfair society.
Of the track, Brewis explains:
“I found myself researching the development of sanitary pads… and was surprised at how little the advertising material has changed in a hundred years. It’s still, ‘Hey Ladies! Let’s not mention it too loudly but here is the perfect product to keep you feeling normal WHILE THE DISGUSTING, DIRTY THING HAPPENS’. And you realise that it’s a kind of madness that a monthly occurrence for billions of women – something absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity – is seen as shameful or dirty – and is taxed MORE than razor blades?! At every stage of making this song, I had to ask myself, am I allowed to do this? Is it okay to do this? And I cringed in the next room when I first showed it to my wife. But I think confronting my own embarrassment is a pretty fundamental part of what the song is about.”
So, thank you Field Music for putting such an important subject to such marvellous music.
Making A New World, the upcoming album from Field Music, is out 10th January via Memphis Industries. Pre-order here.
Mari Lane
@marimindles
Get In Her Ears 