Looping State Of
Mind
The Field
Kompakt Records.
SCQ Rating: 83%
From Here We Go
Sublime first caught my ear in the spring of 2007, and I was hooked. I recall
myself languishing in a suburb outside Halifax for two weeks, endlessly
streaming top cuts like ‘A Paw In My Face’ and trying to track the disc down in
downtown shoppes. By the time I finally found a copy, two months later in
Toronto, and brought it home, the magic had evaporated – as though Axel Willner’s
repetition bludgeoned the fragile hooks to oblivion.
Given that the
Field’s core approach hasn’t deviated over the four years since that debut,
it’s a bit bewildering to concede just how good Looping State Of Mind is. Sure,
2009’s Yesterday & Today found Willner expanding his songwriting, filling generous
run-times with slow-building hooks that wouldn’t let go. But Looping State Of
Mind goes several steps further, delivering Willner’s most accomplished set
yet. The soundscapes vary in feel and texture but all are seductive, from ‘It’s
Up There’’s chilly blur to ‘Then It’s White’’s aftermath of piano-led
vocal-clips, and the beats on each track illustrate as much depth as they do
tempo.
As with any Field album,
patience proves a virtue as Looping State Of Mind continues Willner’s habit of
placing a giant, repetitive zone-out into the sequencing (‘Arpeggiated Love’).
It may not undergo any sudden shifts over its eleven-minutes, but it does
intensify in a way that rewards the enduring listener. And for those of us
who’ve stood by The Field throughout his beige-adorned trilogy, there’s little
questioning that Looping State Of Mind has been a sixty-three minute revelation
worth waiting for.
1 comment:
I've really been getting into this album lately. "Burned Out" was the one that hooked me, especially because I was nearly reaching that at work. I've been falling for the song "Looping State of Mind" when at first, I thought it was too repetitive, but now it's feeling good.
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