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Jan 29, 2016By the time The Morning Is Waiting appears, all glorious awakenings in pianos and strings, the album begins to feel triumphant. The elation continues to the end, with the funk returning in spades for Same Name, before closer Stay Awake warms you up to start over.
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Mar 9, 2016As more challenging and artful pieces like The Morning is Waiting prove, the Brewises’ love for intricate harmonies will always go hand in hand with slick pop hooks.
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Feb 16, 2016This is the band’s sixth album in an 11-year career and it feels at once fresh and self-assured, bearing its painstaking complexity with a striking nonchalance.
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Feb 8, 2016What’s new, though, are the traces of Talking Heads-style funk and a wistfulness prompted by parenthood’s demands. “I’m sorry if I’m ever short with you,” sings David to his wife on the closer, Stay Awake, while the touching The Morning Is Waiting possesses a depth hitherto absent from their work.
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Feb 5, 2016Commontime is full of engaging ideas and genial character, by some distance the most assured and complete of Field Music’s releases.
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Feb 5, 2016The quality of the music is without question but the means of consuming it sometimes hinders the listener from soaking it in at a favoured pace.
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Feb 5, 2016The addition of simple pop elements to Commontime and the fact that the Brewis brothers manage to keep cranking out music this intelligent and flat-out fun to listen to without ever having the slightest dip in quality, makes it one of their more interesting and rewarding efforts to date.
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Q MagazineFeb 4, 2016A triumph of irregular precision. [Mar 2016, p.109]
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Feb 4, 2016Commontime isn’t perfect--it’s slightly too long, and could happily have lost a couple of less distinguished tracks--but there’s still more than enough here to suggest that the reason Field Music are critically acclaimed might have less to do with the kind of band they are than the quality of what they do.
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Feb 2, 2016In a more abstract sense, Field Music have always brought a kind of regional dialect to the rock, pop and, on Commontime more than ever, R&B they so dexterously bend to fit them, and that remains one of their greatest assets.
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Feb 2, 2016Essentially, Commontime is business as usual for Field Music. If anything the mood is distinctly upbeat this time.
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Jan 29, 2016The delightful, multi-mood Commontime is just shy of an hour, opens things out and is more personal [than 2012's Plumb]. This might be the sound of maturing. [Mar 2016, p.96]
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UncutJan 29, 2016The idiosyncratic chamber-pop o these 14 songs evokes The Kinks, XTC and the more melancholy side of Hot Chip; like much of their past work, it's musically intricate, too. [Mar 2016, p.73]
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Feb 2, 2016The album balances the Brewis brothers' predilection for unusual song structures and unconventional instrumentation with a decidedly grown up narrative.
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Feb 16, 2016There may be simple logic behind the phrase quality over quantity yet here there is clear cohesion and thought.
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Feb 5, 2016This is a fine record and if it doesn’t match up to the high standards alluded to above, that’s because Field Music really only sound like Field Music.
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Jan 29, 2016There are more than a few high points to be sure, but the record lacks the inventive spark that we've come to expect from Field Music. [Jan/Feb 2016, p.56]
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Feb 23, 2016At times you wish their sound was edgier, that they'd go in the direction of their zanier peers Hot Chip and BadBadNotGood. Despite that minor criticism, their unique, funky take on pop is rarely less than fascinating.
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Feb 5, 2016The intangibles are all here in spades, and it’s obvious these guys have an exciting vision. Commontime is just arranged in such a way that the album’s contents are thrown into disarray.
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Feb 5, 2016In the end, this is an album with a whimsical construct that fails to extend its ideas and live up to its musical promise.
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Jan 29, 2016Over 14 tracks, repetitive funk riffs and chatty, conversationalist lyrics start to wear a little thin, and a lack of diversity makes for such comfortable listening that you risk all-too-comfortably tuning out.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 12
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Mixed: 1 out of 12
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Negative: 0 out of 12
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Feb 12, 2016