Field Report are one of our very favourite bands here at VSF. We’ve been infatuated with Chris Porterfield’s voice and writing since way back in his days as Conrad Plymouth, and 2014’s Marigolden is, in our opinion, one of the strongest albums of the last few years. It’s with much excitement then that we greet a brand new Field Report album, though Summertime Songs is something of a departure for the Wisconsin band.
The first two Field Report records might have explored a range of moods, but they certainly veered toward the colder seasons. Such categorisation is reductive, but their self-titled debut could be said to be the winter album, and follow-up Marigolden an autumnal offering. As the title suggests however, the new record has different intentions. It’s fuller, more polished, intentionally bright and uplifting with relatively simple singalong choruses. A pop album, in short. This change in direction is clear from the beginning, opener ‘Blind Spot’ coming complete with a slick chorus that seems designed to stick in heads. It’s initially a startling departure from the often chorusless verbose poetics of previous albums, but longtime Field Report fans need not worry, the band haven’t sacrificed much in terms of writing or feeling. Porterfield is still the master storyteller, able to convey so much in simple descriptive sentences. And there’s something strangely reassuring about realising that this is still the band we loved, that you don’t need to peel back many layers of shiny production to find their beating heart.
Things might be sunnier, but Porterfield explores familiar material, the only thing that’s changed his vantage point, now looking back at the tough times, and embroiled in new ones. As we explored in our review, Marigolden was a record about an attempt to break a cycle of addiction and dissatisfaction, to straighten a circular path into a direct line home. How successful the quest was open to interpretation, and the superstitious hope of closing track ‘Enchantment’ suggested that the whole thing might be more a matter of belief in any case. We drew on the writing of Denis Johnson to elucidate how the belief is change was key to the whole enterprise, its presence or absence the difference being floating and sinking.
[Like Marigolden], Angels and Jesus’ Son are populated with sad men trying to find something like this Home, then refusing to believe it or else not liking what they see when they get there. Instead they return to the old bars and the new women and the extraordinary promise of an endless search. Whether Porterfield’s character is doomed on these lines is not clear, but if he is then he hasn’t yet grown cynical with it. The closing lines are infused with belief, the marigolden hope that is woven through album.
With the narrator waking face down in the air bag of a wrecked car, some reviews have cited ‘Blind Spot’ as an immediate relapse from the promise of Marigolden, though it would be fairer to call it a continuation of the themes rather than the narrative. The present-tense promises of change still remain, though Porterfield is positioned ahead of the event, looking back rather than living through, possessing not only the same will to be well but a newfound appreciation of the difficulties of such a state.
‘If I Knew’ makes this clear, not least in the chorus of “If I knew what I know / So far yet to go.” The track does contain relapses, the starting of drinking and stopping of meds, though exactly where and when is not clear, the chronology perhaps not as simple as the order of records. Again we find Porterfield ahead of the crisis, looking back from perhaps not comfort but at least something like critical distance, though this does not influence the immediacy and vividness of his writing:
“And then a car crashed through the wall,
and there you were, in the room,
and the blood red blood bled your outline and it coloured you in.You were close enough to cough on
and your breath smelled like creme de menthe,
headstones, dialtones,
you said ‘hey fucker, where you been?’”
Indeed, to view these songs as a singular continuation of the Marigolden narrative is to perhaps miss the point. Summertime Songs was made during the 2016 US election cycle, a period when Porterfield and his wife were also expecting their first child. There was also a lot of emotional turmoil around when the songs were conceived. “There were a lot of people in my life whose relationships were coming to an end,” Porterfield told Artist Waves, “there was a lot of mourning, reflection and hurt in the air as these songs were coming.”
One interpretation of the record is one of multiplicities, a collection of narrators linked thematically but not personally, a collective struggle against common demons stalking an entire nation. Worry and doubt are the prevailing emotions of the album, the characters that populate the songs going through all manner of difficulties which speak to the listener both on their own terms and against the country’s tumultuous political backdrop. So rather than cast a Trumpian bogeyman, Field Report explore demons older and more insidious and more personal too, conditions woven into the Western experience of which any contemporary figures are merely manifestations, like distorted reflections projected large and loud to highlight our own failings.
For example, ‘Never Look Back’ could be taken as a break-up song or a make-up song, but beyond the personal lie lines ominously pertinent to the present in light of an imperial past. “Turn the telescope back around,” Porterfield sings, “With these troubles out of view / Forgiveness does not excuse, it’s to prevent everybody from destroying you.” This is followed by ’60 Second Distance Run’, a song of searching questions in view of an approaching reckoning, while the spacious ‘Every Time’ provides the most impassioned and insistent moment on the record. If the past here haunts the narrator, then it is a spirit of poltergeistic nature, something capable of seizing and moving and throwing its weight.
“Last night I had a dream there was tartar on your teeth
And you had me gently, with a knife, loosening it free
And then spread it all around like sunscreen at the beach
And we were laying there for hours, your head resting on my knee
While the late season ice was sneering from the shade
I’m gonna keep you under glass and keep trapped in amber memory
The secret anniversary of a first date”
‘Healing Machine’ is something of a waking dream, an insomniac’s hope of redemption, while the thematic centrepiece and spiritual title track, ‘Summertime’, opens in an almost jarring manner, the vocals not quite clicking into the rhythm of the instrumentation. However, soon the floor drops away and suddenly it’s all swaying hips and swooning hearts, a smash hit Springsteen-style jam. This energy belies the anxious lyrics, the delicate existence of sobriety and parenthood colliding with a tumultuous cultural moment to produce a kind of paralysis that the music fights to escape.
And escape seems to be achieved, because ‘Tightrope’ plays as something of a continuation, as though ‘Summertime’ was the getaway car and this the heady freedom thereafter, a manic disregard of danger in the hysterical relief of a wider reprieve. ‘Occupied Mind’ sees the tempo slow, a tale of finding solace within others, while closer ‘Everything I Need’ is slower still, an emotive piano ballad, Porterfield’s vocals aching with a sense of warm and uncertain contentment and the hope of personal connection. “I don’t trust this moment,” he sings, speaking of everything outside, “but I want to believe.”
This the crux of the record. The summertime theme might conjure ideas of cloudless, uptempo good times, but to limit Field Report’s use of the season to a more poppy sound is to miss the deeper point. Although more morose, Marigolden‘s autumnal setting set up an album-wide metaphor of change, the very environment shifting in colour and shape as its inhabitants fled toward warm burrows. Summer might be stereotypically viewed as a more positive time, by Porterfield uses it as a long, well-lit stretch of looking forward and back, relatively changeless in comparison with what has been and what will come. This extends to the position of the narrators too. Vast change belongs to spring and autumn, flurries of growing and dying capable of wiping the slate clean. Summer offers no such reprieve. We cannot rely on grand promises or paradigm shifts. Rather, we must commit to the slow, considered process of letting go and working through, of deciding who we were and who we want to be. In these times, we’d be foolish to trust that will be enough, but belief in small moments of agency and human connection is more productive than misplaced prayers for epiphany.
Summertime Songs is out now on Verve Forecast and you can get it from the Field Report website.
