S.Lo on May 3rd, 2018

0

Sometimes it takes a while to notice a good thing. Shifting from our periphery is Field Report’s shimmery third album, “Summertime Songs,” their first release on Verve Forecast. It’s a lush collection of easy favorites for the coming season, exploring the edges of relationships, family and questioning the road taken. Their latest single, “Blind Spot” is an uplifting anthem about waking up from near-misses after crashing and burning hard. Among the beaming keyboards, guitars, bass and drums of his bandmates (Thomas Wincek, Barry Clark and Devin Drobka, respectively), frontman Christopher Porterfield sings with the gift of metaphor, “This heart is a cold cave / My mind is a parking lot / And your voice came like a frost-quake on the flames / This whole body is a closet filled with hoarded nothings / My sword is a cathedral in an air raid.”

Porterfield says of the album, “People have called our [self-titled] first record ‘wintery.’ And [second album] ‘Marigolden’ was ‘autumnal.’ This is our version of a summer record. It has hooks. It’s a pop record. When you make something, you’re going to pick up some of the environment in which it was made. It was made in the summer. It was also made in the midst of the disintegration of relationships: partners were quitting on each other; barrel bottoms were discovered; health was compromised. And America was running a parallel kamikaze breakup narrative … The resulting record is sort of like a windows down, elbow out the window, watching the world sort of get pulled apart.” Porterfield watches from the inside out, airing the unspoken from the souls of those struggling around him. In a documentary chronicling the album’s creation (see below), he says, “I found out that I have a lot more empathy as a narrator [after getting sober from alcohol about five years ago]. I am very few of the narrators on this record.”  

The band dedicated more time to flesh out those voices and their surrounding sounds for “Summertime Songs.” Anticipating the birth of Porterfield’s first baby after a period of touring, they settled in with producer Daniel Holter at his studio Wire & Vice in Milwaukee, Wis. “We treated the studio as a studio, that is, the working place of a painter or sculptor or photographer,” says Porterfield, “Suddenly you’ve got this whole machine, this whole camera telescopic thing, a periscope or whatever, all these lenses firing light back and forth through one another, and mirrors reflecting and refracting and prismatic humanity all around. And that’s the job of art.” 

With that, we are quite dazzled.

||| Stream: “Blind Spot,” “If I Knew” and “Never Look Back”

||| Live: Field Report will play the Bootleg theater on May 8. Tickets

||| Also: Watch the documentary “Field Report Makes Summertime Songs”

||| Previously: “Wings,” “Chico, the American,” “Fergus Falls”