Plumb is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Field Music. It was released by Memphis Industries on 13 February 2012. With 15 tracks over 35 minutes, the album consisted of short tracks that weave and intertwine together like an extended suite. This marked a deliberate departure from Field Music's previous double album Measure (2010), marking a return to the more fragmentary nature of the band's first two albums, Field Music (2005) and Tones of Town (2007). Plumb was nominated for the 2012 Mercury Prize, much to the band's surprise.
Plumb has been described as a "melting pot of genres, influences, and styles", incorporating elements from the funk style of Peter Brewis' side project The Week That Was, and the new wave and synth rock of David Brewis' School of Language. The songs on Plumb featured a wide variety of instrument combinations, from horns and strings to synthesizers and keyboards, as well as a great deal of falsetto vocals and sophisticated harmonies. The album featured interchanging time signatures, rapidly changing tempos, and sudden changes in tone and mood.
The lyrics of Plumb touched on several topics, including financial difficulties from the Great Recession and frustration with the state of politics at the time. Other themes included loneliness and nostalgia, everyday life for the British working class, and dissatisfaction with consumerism as well as other aspects of the modern world. The title Plumb, broadly meaning "straight" or "level", also inspired the purple artwork on the album's cover because it is a homophone of "plum".
This marked the first Field Music album without the band's former keyboardist Andrew Moore. Plumb was the first of five consecutive albums Field Music recorded in a new studio in Sunderland following the closure of a space the band shared for 10 years with the Futureheads. The album received positive reviews, and appeared on several year-end lists of the best albums of 2012. Several reviewers compared Plumb to the work of such artists as XTC, Pink Floyd, Yes, the Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren, Electric Light Orchestra, and the Beatles.
Background
Plumb was the fourth studio album by Field Music, the English rock band led by brothers David and Peter Brewis. Released through the band's label Memphis Industries, it marked Field Music's second album since returning from a hiatus in 2010. Andrew Moore, former Field Music keyboardist, did not perform on Plumb. David Brewis said the album title Plumb was the most entertaining option from a list of possible titles they prepared. He said the title had "a bunch of connotations" based upon the word plumb's definition of straight or level. The album cover and artwork involved a great deal of the color purple because of the rhyme between the words plumb and plum.
The cover of the album is a drawing of a filling station, which David said the band was attracted to because of the political, economic, and environmental implications of such stations. Peter Brewis made the collage, while both brothers provided input about its use in the album layout. Peter sought for the cover to be part collage and part naturalistic, which the band felt reflected the way they record music. The image was also partially inspired by a print in Peter's bathroom of an Edward Ruscha painting called Standard, which showed a gas station rendered to highlight different perspectives, geometry, and colours. The band tried to commission artist Richard Galpin, who has also created works involving filling stations, to create the Plumb cover, but he was unavailable because he was working on artwork for another album.
Musical style and composition Album structure
While Field Music's previous release Measure was a 75-minute double album, the band sought to make a significantly shorter and tighter album with Plumb, which has a running time of just over 35 minutes. Peter Brewis said: "We wanted to do something that was in opposition to the previous record, which was long, too long some people might say, and that really worked as an album that could be listened to all the way through and flowed as a whole." David Brewis noted that when preparing an album, "we usually do the opposite of what we did before", and that since Measure embraced more traditional rock conventions in the style of bands like Free and Led Zeppelin, Field Music wanted to move in a different direction with Plumb. Peter Brewis said: "We weren't reinventing the wheel with every song but we were trying to, I think in my mind, make it short and coherent and concise but every track to be different as well."
Prior to the recording of Plumb, David and Peter had written several pieces of music short pieces of music that did not conform to the traditional structure of three-minute pop song, including fragmentary tracks and unused ideas from Measure and other recording sessions. Most songs on the album are under three minutes, with several that two minutes or less. The longest is "A New Town" at about four minutes, while the shortest is "How Many More Times?" at 40 seconds. The band felt stretching them to a traditional song length would have felt contrived, so instead they sought to structure the album in such a way to support the shorter pieces. Peter Brewis said: "The idea was to be dictated by the music, not by the convention."
As a result, Plumb consists largely of short tracks that weave and intertwine together, like an extended suite. The songs flow into each other, and most lack the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure. This marked a departure from the more conventionally structured Measure, and was more similar to the fragmentary nature of their first two albums, Field Music (2005) and Tones of Town (2007). David Brewis said the individual tracks are modular and shift rapidly between sections in a more linear way than normally found on a pop album. David also said he believed listeners would at times believe they had heard multiple songs while they had in fact only listened to one, and vice versa.
For example, Aaron Lavery of Drowned in Sound said the opening track, "Start the Day Right", sounds as if it consists of three different songs, even though the track is only slightly more than two minutes long. Likewise, Gareth James of Clash wrote that "Choosing Sides" is "itself several songs in one". In particular, the first three songs on the album – "Start The Day Right", "It's Okay To Change", and "Sorry Again, Mate" – blend into each other with direct transitions and time signature changes; Helen Clarke of musicOMH said they "sound like one long, Queen-inspired epic". However, there are also full-length, individual songs that the album is built around, such as "A New Town", "(I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing", and "From Hide and Seek to Heartache".
Brent Ables of cokemachineglow described this structure as a "juxtaposition of discrete musical ideas that obey their own logic", with tracks that "flow together as fluently as the individual parts of each". Ian King of PopMatters called it a "linear collage-pop structure", while Pitchfork writer Aaron Leitko called it "a record of sweetly melodic miniatures" that take form only long enough to shift into an entirely new suite. David Brewis said the approach was "quite anachronistic" in a way because it adhered strongly to the concept of an album, rather than the more modern concept of individual digital tracks. Brewis said he prefers becoming immersed in a full album, adding: "I don't think we have particularly embraced the iPod world or the iPod Shuffle". He added that Field Music tends to structure its albums in two distinct halves, like two sides of a vinyl record, and he noted the largest gap between songs on Plumb is in the middle of the album because that would be the spot where a record would be switched to the other side.
Mix of genres Plumb has been described as a work of multiple genres, including indie rock, chamber pop, indie pop, neo-prog, progressive rock, baroque pop, art rock, art pop, alternative rock, power pop, progressive pop, and britpop. A review in Sputnikmusic.com described the album as "a melting pot of genres, influences, and styles". Some reviewers said Plumb pays homage to classic rock.
Plumb incorporated elements from each of the Brewis brothers' side projects, including the funk style of Peter Brewis' The Week That Was and the new wave and synth rock of David Brewis' School of Language. Kyle Lemmon of Prefix Magazine said this was particularly prevalent in the track "(I Keep Thinking About) a New Thing". Helen Clarke of musicOMH wrote that the combination of the two styles resulted in "a collection of overblown, juddering XTC staccato rhythms". Some of the album's more funky moments include the guitar mantra in "A New Town", and the song "Is This the Picture?", which Clash writer Gareth James described as "highly strung plastic-funk". Several of the songs combine prog rock and pop sensibilities, while songs like "A New Town", "Choosing Sides", "Who'll Pay the Bills?", and "Is This The Picture?" blend elements of prog rock and new wave. One of the more prog-heavy songs is "A Prelude to Pilgrim Street", a piano and dulcimer miniature, which began with the sound of church bells, before segueing into continuing with piano chords and rapid drumming in a style reviewers have compared to Pink Floyd and The Who.
The album explored a progressive rock sound that had been featured more moderately in past Field Music works. It can be heard particularly in the reverberating bassline in "Who'll Pay the Bills?" and the heavy synthesizer undertone in "Choosing Sides". Tim Sendra of AllMusic said the progressive rock sound featured in Plumb was not the excessively challenging kind, but rather the accessible type that was prevalent on AOR stations in the 1970s. Likewise, Clarke described the one-minute interlude "It's Okay to Change" as "bonkers prog-rock with lashings of post-punk synths". Additionally, chamber pop elements can found in several songs with elaborate vocal choruses, and instrumental orchestral flourishes. For example, Lemmon called "So Long Then" a "lovely piano-led chamber piece", and Clarke described "Sorry Again, Mate" as having a "wonky, luscious chamber pop sound", while NME writer Hamish MacBain said it featured "a harmony-laden chorus that's almost Coldplay-like". "Ce Soir" also featured classical-leaning instrumentation, with strings and piano, which Lemmon sounded like the soundtrack a 1920s silent film.
The Brewis brothers have said musicals were an influence on the album, and reviewers have compared portions of Plumb to film scores; Memphis Industries said the album bears similarities to "20th century film music from Bernstein to Willy Wonka". The album's introduction in opening track "Start the Day Right", in particular, bears similarities to the soundtracks of Walt Disney films, with wind chimes, strings, and a four-note melody on bells, before segueing into boisterous drums and an electric guitar riff.
Instrumentation and vocals In addition to Field Music's usual intricate guitar work and powerful drumming, the songs on Plumb included a wide variety of instrument combinations, including horns, clarinets, and string instruments like violins and cellos. The album also includes more synthesizers and keyboards than past Field Music albums, in part because the band was able to set up a greater number of keyboards in their new studio. "From Hide And Seek To Heartache" in particular makes prominent use of string instruments, as well as driving piano and rhythmic percussion parts.