What Goes Unsaid - Or 'why Field Music are geniuses'

There's a great passage cosseted in the middle of 'Death in the Afternoon' where Ernest Hemingway brings to task Aldous Huxley's criticism of the simplicity of Hemingway's language, that he aspires downwards and condescends. Hemingway retorts that 'When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. Characters are caricatures... No matter how good a phrase or simile he has if he puts it where it is not absolutely necessary he spoils his work for his egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.'

And what does this have to do with Field Music? I've always felt them the masters of the unsaid. Their close vignettes just state an idea, they don't embellish it, burn it too far or overplay it. Take 'She Can Do What She Wants' as a prime example. Its opening line states a fact, and a notion 'She's not home, somehow I knew she'd have gone have gone.' Its followed by a recollection 'she said - now leave me, it's easy'. We don't know why she said this, its our place to guess, but we can tell she's in charge, he did it and he came back later. These are real people, real experiences, our views of what's playing out aren't drawn one way or another by the words being said.

The closing line of the song asks 'how come I feel wrong, cos she can do what she wants?'. It's the first time either character admits to the woman's ascendancy, an ending. The music is incessant throughout, a chugging guitar riff accompanies the tale, suggestive of a repetitious experience. The harmonious crescendo to the song seems to note an element of relief but this is only ever implied.

Like Hemingway Field Music trade only in the matter of fact, their music is what allows the interpretation and it's this interplay between elements, this balance that gives their sound its immediacy, its gravitas - much as Hemingway's settings did the same - the Sea, wartime, the bullfight - the drama is borne from the clash of the extraordinary and the mundane.

Just as great prose need never be aspirational (though in this writer's opinion it often is) nor should great pop music have the same endeavour. If Hemingway were alive, I think he'd take to Field Music.