You Worry About The Same Old Thing

Field Music “In The Mirror”

The Brewis brothers of Field Music excel at crafting neat, orderly songs that come across like character studies of mild-mannered, repressed men struggling to deal with stress and anxiety like some kind of mature adult. Some of their compositions deal with faint conflicts rendered in tight yet essentially breezy music, but the most affecting numbers, like “In The Mirror”, foreground nervous tensions without letting them entirely crack through the song’s highly polished surface. In this track, the steady trebly ringing of a piano is contrasted with rock instrumentation so mannered that it plays almost like classical music, like a bit of loose scrawl on a rigid grid. The lyrics are subtly gutting: “I wish I could change and make new rules, and love myself better,” delivered plaintively, but rather matter-of-fact. It’s like a struggle to contain earnest, potent emotion, and to attempt to rationalize every problem. Some music works for us because it allows us to indulge in thoughts and feelings we can’t really allow ourselves to freely express. This has a different function, either giving us insight into someone else, or serving as a mirror for our own repressed anxieties.

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