Broken Bells, Field Music... thinking person's pop and looking back to psychadelia

Broken Bells and Field Music are two of the current wave of groups who hark back to golden era of psychadelic pop. The Beatles, The Kinks, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, the young Pink Floyd and others... shared a similar ethic and influenced each other. They began as hit parade outfits, outgrew the medium and went on to explore other possibilities.

The music they carried on to make was both lyrically and melodically dense. While in their later period The Beatles were more liberally experimental, the Kinks and the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys kept the song at the centre of focus - not straying off into cul-de-sacs of strange, looped sound effects and throwaway half ditties. For us today though, after punk, after Velvet Undergound, the Clash, the Jam, and the after shocks which reveberated on into post-punk, new romantic, gothic, grunge... - music largely became simpler; no mid-song changes in tempo or time signatures, melodies are generally borne by the lead vocal with the lead guitar taking a back seat unless there's a bridge.

The psychadelic sophiscation in structure can be readily heard in the use of multi-layered melodies, tightly packed lyrics, the folk-ish use of backing vocals right through the verse, the occasional lack of any lead vocal in a chorus, and the use of multiple phrases or segments in a song well beyond simple verse and chorus. All these elements were a movement away from pop music's roots in the simple blues forms.

Curiously, the two new albums are both eponymous - Broken Bells and Field Music (Measure) , this is usually taken as a statement of artistic identity - "This is the real me". Although both albums evoke the psychadelic period, they're still fundamentally rock-pop, but exploring the busy, inventive end of the spectrum. Further, it sounds as though there was also deliberate engineering choice to aim for the more 60's type of sound - Hammond organ sounding synths... basic, overdriven electric guitar... regular wooden drums rather than electric or digital sounds.

Broken Bells are the American duo James Mercer (vocals, guitar, bass), and Danger Mouse (real name Brian Burton, playing bass, drums, vocals, keyboards). Danger Mouse is the more famous of the pair following his banned Grey Album (an unauthorised mash up of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album), followed by a stellar production career working with Gorillaz, The Rapture, Beck and the Black Keys. Mercer is otherwise the lead singer of the Shins and formerly Flake.

An early archetype for this type of song was the Beatles' Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. The most obvious example here is Broken Bells' "Your Head is On Fire" - beginning with a multi-layered intro that presages the chorus - it has synths, a melody and a repeating group chorus, before the song stops, changes tempo and rhythm, and an enters verse with accoustic guitar and strings... there's a stop, then it changes back into the chorus phrasing. "October" is like a 21st century retake of the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon", so laid back it's almost wearing board shorts and a straw hat.

However there's a lot more going on here than Kinks raiding - BB also have a fine sense of soul. "The High Road" has a 70's folk-rock groove, and "Vaporize" continues the vibe with Hammond style organ, perhaps mining a similar heritage-seam to recent Radiohead work. "The Ghost Inside" adds a slight Motown/Stax swagger to its 'post-world' cool strut, with slowed up funk bass, handclaps, and a great hook of a chorus, it's reminiscent of the better Gorillaz output (say, "Kids with Guns") and possibly the best song here.

This type of music is often about uncontained creativity - songs are not whittled down into a more classic 3minute pop structure, and the ideas are not puffed out beyond their merit - so you tend to end up with lots of slightly disjointed, unfinished sounding phrases. I tend to find it can lack flow, or momentum and can be hard to follow. The constant stop-start nature of the tempo disrupts the way I personally experience music - groove first, then harmony, melody, and finally lyric.

It's sophisticated, and that adjective doesn't necessarily mean a value judgement of either or bad, any more than it would (or should) imply such in another art form. As ever, the value judgement is more about personal taste, but also about the resonance of the ideas conveyed and the skill with which this is done.

That said, with DangerMouse's ever-smart, efficient, pop editing and ear for a hook, they can't go too far wrong and this album is likeable and accessible.

Measure, although inspired by the same period, has a slightly different vibe and it's also quite definitely an album of two halves. It begins with cheerful, seaside-pavillion pop, perhaps a little over-consciously sounding like the '67 Beatles' (Sgt. Peppers or Magical Mystery Tour). There's acoustic guitar and handclaps, noisy drums, loads of harmony, and bouncy, barroom-singalong choruses. Then, in the second half, things go a bit prog, specifically they go quite a lot 'early Pink Floyd'. "Clear Water" has a strange, stompy cack-handed rhythm to rival "Money", and "Lights Up" is a stoned, escapist fantasy (say, from Meddle), lazily dragging itself up into standing for the song to eventually start. before again wandering off into the night.

They resemble the early Floyd in a number of ways. Firstly there is that sense of the opaquely meaningful. The lyrics all seem to be about deeply mystical, very important things... but you've absolutely no idea what. This is heightened by the regular use of deep harmonies during verses.  A second reason is the use of a main melody on a bass guitar. This is a neat trick, retaining the melody in a phrase, but also giving the song a cavernous sense of space to float around in. Then there's Floyd-ish use of vibraphone, and strings (obviously), and 'ambient' sound effects (again - obviously). And a final reason is the falsetto vocal. This is usually a pet hate, but in this context it's not unlikeable.

"All You'd Ever Need to Say" is a monstrous riff-jam, packed with melody lines and harmonised phrases of just a few bars at a time. It can be a bit dizzying. It's core is a funky riff - but with the legs and arms chopped off leaving it not all that funk after all. The final three tracks form a movement "Something Familiar / Share the Words / It's about time", with repeated melodic themes running throught the set. "Something Familiar" is just the kind of sprawling "kitchen-sink-and-everything-else" song that Queen, or better yet - Meatloaf, are famous for (written for the piano perhaps?)


A irritating shortcoming is that at a number of points in the album, there seems to be unintentional similarity or direct repetition of earlier riffs and melodies. So I kept finding myself thinking "Hold on.. didn't I just listen to this earlier...?".
 

Measure is actually very good - it's packed full of ideas and melodies, it's very well executed and engineered, coherently produced. It's just not my taste; there's the frustrating lack of actual groove... the falsetto vocals... the obscurantist lyrical direction. There's a rock opera in here struggling to break free. If you like this, make sure you also check out the Flaming Lips - especially their last album which is fantastic.