Field of Reeds

With their risky third album, abandoned the angular dance-punk of and the gloomy electronic beats of to reinvent themselves once again for , a record as indebted to classical scores and avant-garde jazz as rock. Taking a hands-off, live approach to the recording process, and allowing open space and emptiness to take precedence over beats, the music has a disturbing, dystopian feel to it, swinging from detached to nightmarish before resolving into something lovingly tranquil. Some of the best songs, like "Fragment 2," "V (Island Song)," and "Spiral" (which sounds like a fever-dream version of and 's "I've Seen It All" duet from the soundtrack), thrive in this push and pull between atonal dissonance and sheer beauty. Even ' most stark numbers, while often lacking a concrete backbeat or definitive structure, are bursting with details and ideas. Ambient textures, constructed from melancholic horns and eerie analog synthesizer tones, add a wavering undercurrent that is often hair-raising and haunting. The production is equally unconventional. After writing the material in Essex and Amsterdam, fleshed out the parts with his brother before recording in London, Gloucester, and Berlin with new honey-voiced Portuguese singer , utilizing an unusual magnetic resonator piano and meticulously detailing the songs with field recordings, including breaking glass and the screaming of an actual hawk. This perfectionism, present in the sonics and in the complex arrangements, makes the most challenging title in their catalog and also the most groundbreaking. ~ Jason Lymangrover