Port O'Brien - "I Woke Up Today"

On the Port O'Brien one-sheet it explains that these songs were written while at sea. There was trend back in 2004-ish of a lot of bands giving their work a nautical aesthetic (Picaresque, Blueberry Boat, BOAT) but where they presented "what life must be like out at sea", Port O'Brien is explaining that "it's still life, it's just out at sea." There's a song about accidentally catching a puffin in the nets, there's one called "A Bird Flies By", and I'm convinced. These are the thoughts you have in this kind of isolation, these events take the foreground and have no competition, so they mean everything. "I Woke Up Today" has a barefoot, wooden plank kind of feeling, lit by lantern, an orange light. I know it's the most unlikely case, but I imagine this recorded at sea too, and the loneliness, even of their collected voices, is unyielding in the persistent, empty landscape of the human part of the ocean at night. [Site]

School of Language - "Rockist Part I"

Half of Field Music, David Brewis, is School of Language. And this feels academic to me, so it's cohesive. It's kind of dressed in a uniform, it feels single file, it's on the clock. It's a bell-ringer, a study group, a five-minute washroom break. It's a contained kind of emotion, it looks up to sky but dares not reach. And for that reason, kind of fades out without ever really reaching its full potential, it merely does good enough. [MySpace]