After nearly twenty years in service, the North East’s long-life art-rock duo Field Music have stubbornly maintained a policy to steer clear from the crowd. It seems to work for them too. A distinctive outlier from the plethora of ’00s indie guitar bands, their music is not so much an artifact as an unscathed survivor, altogether separate from their many extinct counterparts. 

The implementation of orchestral political nuances during 2018’s Open Here and more recently, their conceptual post-World War I history lesson in last year’s Making A New World, Field Music can be easily singled out for their tireless ambition. Their new album Flat White Moon exercises less grandeur and revives a more playful approach that offsets darkness and grief with unusually open arms. 

The album’s upbeat attitude is infectious as it routinely knocks back personal upheavals with disproportionately happy-go-lucky stoicism. Guilt-stricken feelings of absence in face of lost loved ones are stifled out on ‘Out Of The Frame’. They manage to wrap up suffocating loneliness with twee accents of early Beatles pop appeal on ‘You Last Heard From a Linda’. Immediately gratifying, Field Music seem to revel in hardship, but in a way that never dilutes or obscures.