Field Mouse | review

With a blend of sugar-sweet melodic lines and unapologetically raw timbres, New York dream poppers Field Mouse release their debut album Hold Still Life later this summer. The album presents itself as homage to the grungier sounds of the nineties, with a relatively blurred vocal/instrumental relationship. The paradigms of soft grunge are stretched to enable the elusive vocals of Rachel Browne and the electric cloud of synthesizers. The overall sound is a stylish mix of an experimental song-writing session and a psychedelic trip through the realms of dream pop.
‘Two Ships’, the first single released from the record, exemplifies the album’s overall sound. The song builds upon a racey guitar line with sleepy synthesizers facilitating the layered melody. Browne’s vocals intertwine with the tonality of the instruments leaving listeners with an overall sense of unity. The vocals become the synth, become the guitar, and become the bass, with no melodic path without intersection. Despite the strength of her voice, Browne never overpowers and remains in control, perhaps aware that the voice’s interaction with the instruments trumps its individual forte every time.
This unified instrumental element is juxtaposed against Browne’s lyrics which, while sung with tantalizing delicacy, explore a darkness in the topic of heartbreak and solitude. The metre and tempo present something relatively uplifting while the lyrics delve into the darker territory of millennial New Yorkers, despairing at the isolation of their ‘hundred rooms’ in the city. Those living with the confusion and hectic segregation of city life will relate to the melancholic truths of the track, while those who are happy enough in their cultural isolation can still find something to relate to in the multi-faceted emotive lyrics.
Another stand-out track on the album comes in the form of ‘Everyone but you’, an upbeat blend of rock, synth-pop and grunge. With it’s opening bars and verse employing the sweetness of teenage love, the chorus bites with the desperation of sole-companionship. With the guitar lines blending to fuzzy overlays, the band build elements of shoe gaze atop their drearily descending electronic rock vibes. The track is the perfect blend of the consonance and dissonance of twenty-something soul searching, and the quest for the individual relatable soul.
Overall the blended contrast of giddy electronic pop and sleepy shoe gaze builds to generate what could be the marriage of The Smashing Pumpkins, Warpaint and The Cardigans. Field Mouse has gained support in artists such as Clash, Brooklyn Vegan and Noisey. If the evolution of the band’s sound from their early days to this album is anything to go by, Field Mouse will continue to grow as an ensemble, perhaps stretching to orbiting genres and extending the hypothesis of their own sound.