FIELDS

Main chronology:

• 2007: Everything Last Winter

EVERYTHING LAST WINTER

1) Song for the Fields; 2) Charming the Flames; 3) You Don't Need This Song (To Fix Your Broken Heart); 4) Schoolbooks; 5) The Death; 6) You Brought This on Yourself; 7) Skulls and Flesh and More; 8) Feathers; 9) If You Fail We All Fail; 10) Parasite

Epic and dramatic, and so full of potential.

My copy of Everything Last Winter has a sticker on the jewel case with a quote from NME: "2007 will surely be theirs". While Fields did have reasonable critical success with their debut album, 2007 was hardly a breakout year for them - and two two years later, they had already disbanded after their label booted them right on the eve of their second (still unreleased) album campaign launch.

Fields turned out to be another drive-by victim of the relentless churn of the British rock scene in the mid-00s. Rock music was the height of cool once more and the UK kept delivering success stories, whether it was the emergent post-punk of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, the landfill indie of Libertines and Kaiser Chiefs or the adjacent group of artsier and more expansive acts (Guillemots, etc) who got to share that limelight through proximity - or any of the countless acts following in their tail that made UK-centric music blogs so exciting to read at the time. That era of British music launched a number of still active careers and saw the release several debut and sometimes even sophomore records now considered genre classics. But there's always also the sad hopefuls who barely got to step out of the door before they slipped into irrelevance. That wasn't necessarily due to a lack of quality control, but rather because so many labels were so keen to ride on the wave that they signed countless exciting young groups they saw potential money in, who'd then be abandoned the moment it was apparent they weren't going to be instant chart-toppers. It was a brutal battleground of an era, and a treasure trove if you're not averse to some gravedigging (good news it's cheap to do so - 2004-2007 seems to be the source of 80% of second hand CD shop inventories in the UK).

Everything Last Winter is one of the epitomes of those forgotten not-quite classics which saw the light of the day during those wonder years but which have since been lost beneath the dust of ages, to some extent a little unfairly or disappointingly so. At the center of Fields' sound are the melodic flourishes and towering choruses you'd expect from this hook-embracing "scene", but here they're drenched in grand dynamic swoons, loud crunching guitar walls and other high-volume, high-texture elements which bulldoze the way through. It's one of the closer examples of the maximalist indie rock that had become all the rage across the pond surfacing in the UK, but Fields have then taken lessons from the dynamics of post-rock to achieve that height of sound. Much of Everything Last Winter reaches out loudly and dramatically - the hectic gallop of the signature song "Song for the Fields" (still an enormously impressive introduction), the shimmering keyboards and shoegaze guitars holding hands on "If You Fail We All Fail", the rising noise that forms the climax of "Feathers" - but there's a deftly melodic band underneath all that volume and it's how they guide those intricately arranged melodies through the walls of sound that sets Fields up for success. There's a lot of extended finales, dynamic spikes and crashing crescendos across Everything Last Winter, where even the less muscular songs often sound powerful: take "You Brought This on Yourself" (potentially the best song here) which, despite the crunchy bass that slams right into your ears the moment the track begins, distills the album's most melodic sensibilities into its swiveling guitar notes and chorus harmonies, leading to gently gigantic song that sounds simultaneously personal and universally anthemic, something that would have caused a rapture of cheers upon its first notes at a headlining concert in another timeline. The sighing vocals from both lead singer Nick Peill and frequent co-vocalist/keyboard player Þórunn Antonía bring a sense of fragility into the heart of the songs, another theatrical gesture to underline the desired resonance. It's all impeccably confident, and all the more thrilling for it.

None of this is new or unique to Fields, obviously. The inspirations are loud and clear, soft melody + hard volume isn't a revolutionary concept and even the vocal interplay bring to mind some of the band's peers from this era who pushed a similar dynamic. You can sometimes even predict how things go - no points for guessing that the sub-3 minute closer "Parasite" is the lone simple lullaby of the album. Therein lies the reason I think this one of the bigger lost souls of its era. Everything Last Winter is a great album, with a number of of excellent songs across it: besides all the ones already mentioned in the last paragraph (which may as well be the top 4 of the record), the more direct "Charming the Flames" and the Antonía-centric "Skulls and Flesh and More" are equal candidates for any listing. But perhaps even moreso, this is also an incredibly tantalising first full-length release from a new band, full of promise that was never cashed in. You could have imagined Fields pushing any of the album's many facets further on the hypothetical follow-up - lean in on the double-vocal chemistry, give the keyboards a bigger spotlight, make the guitars even crunchier and rowdier, hone in on the melodic riches - and it likely would've have resulted in something that at the very least would have been just as good, and in all likelihood would have resembled a sound closer to something truly their own. Even just a less sterile production would have been a good start: the only real flaw of Everything Last Winter is how clinical its instruments sometimes sound, the likely result of the label trying to nudge the album closer to its peers but which occasionally dampens the impact they leave.

Of course the sad thing is that the sequel never came, which leaves Everything Last Winter with the unpleasant legacy of being an excellent album that leaves you wanting more, which would never materialise. If you'd like to you can always travel back in time and scoop up all the pre-album material, but it's not the same as actually seeing where Fields could have gone forward. It's annoying, but at least the one album they did leave behind is still exciting as it is. This review spends perhaps a little too much time daydreaming about a future that never happened that maybe it obscures slightly the past that did occur, and the strengths that Everything Last Winter carries. Fields sounded fully-formed right out of the gate and the strength of songwriting and the ideas the band carried are already blooming in full colour across their one and only album. Many of their peers started close to the ground and part of their charisma was in that relative relatability: Fields, on the other hand, are wrapped up in their own dream world and each aching chorus and explosive crescendo is a bridge from them to the listener. It's not a truly immortal one-album wonder and it may not have lead to any kind of a cult following either, but this is very head and toes with any of the other big hitter debuts of its era.

Physically: Standard jewel case with a nice big booklet, ornately setting out the lyrics and associated artwork. All very theatrical, as is appropriate.