These New Puritans: Fields of Reeds (Infectious)

 |   |  <1 min read

These New Puritans: Dream
These New Puritans: Fields of Reeds (Infectious)

Start as you mean to go on, they say. And TNP's Jack Barnett certainly leads you into this project gently with an opening track where the slow piano and horns are in the foreground and somewhere down a long corridor a woman seems to be singing her way through something akin to Bacharach-David's This Guy's in Love With You.

This isn't a collar-grabbing start but one which immediately makes you stop, slow down and try to engage with it as the horn section slides across your sightlines and then everything tails down into the subsequent piece, Fragment Two.

TNPs are an ambitious outfit from London which orchestrates and arranges stately music which also includes electronics and, on this album, a children's chorus (not as twee as that sounds) and choral parts. Lyrically it is all about space (in life, relationships) and you could spend a lot of time combing for threads and clues.

So this is art music for enjoyment and analysis where your reference points might be Scott Walker around Tilt, experimental contemporary chamber music and just a smidgen of pretension.

It is lovely, challenging, never without interest and . . . my suspicion is those who have hailed it are perhaps in awe of its scope, absolute seriousness and ambition, but -- like me -- would never play it that often after a few hearings. 

Share It

Your Comments

Gary Steel - Jul 16, 2013

Maybe, just maybe, it's not necessary to play the album over and over, because maybe, just maybe, it makes such an impression that it stays with you... like hearing a tui at dawn. Perhaps this craving for repetition of favourite songs is just a symptom of the disease...

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

OOIOO: Nijimusi (Thrill Jockey/digital outlets)

OOIOO: Nijimusi (Thrill Jockey/digital outlets)

The key member of this long-running Japanese No Wave/avant-noise outfit is drummer YoshimiO of the Boredoms and what began as a joke/parody morphed into a real band, now up to its eighth album... > Read more

BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Azam Ali: From Night to the Edge of Day (Six Degrees)

BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2011 Azam Ali: From Night to the Edge of Day (Six Degrees)

Nominally lullabies from around the Middle East, this breathy and exceptional album by the Iranian-born Canadian-resident Ali -- singer in the band Niyaz -- becomes something much more hypnotic as... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Various Artists: Gambian Griot Kora Duets (Smithsonian Folkways)

Various Artists: Gambian Griot Kora Duets (Smithsonian Folkways)

The magical and mercurial sound of the kora – a 21-string instrument from West Africa has become familiar on the Womad circuit in the past few decades and names like Toumani Diabate, Seckou... > Read more

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . THE BEVIS FROND: Scuz me while we kiss this guy

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . THE BEVIS FROND: Scuz me while we kiss this guy

For a man with his name on almost 30 albums in the past three decades, you'd think the name Nick Saloman would be pretty well known. Okay, the albums all come under his band's name, but even... > Read more