The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

“Field Music was starting to restrict my creativity,” says David Brewis, one third of the Sunderland group that seemed to earn the affection of nigh on every leftfield-leaning muso before announcing their shock retirement last year. “I got tired of the expectations of being in a band and playing anonymous venues where people were expecting something. There was always a bunch who really understood what we were about, but I got sick of doing gigs where the audience had already decided what it was going to be like before we’d even played a single note.”

With the release of their self-titled debut in 2005, Field Music delivered an album of baroque indie pop, then trumped it a year later with Tones of Town. A myriad of time-signature changes and clever hooks ensured the group rightly earned their stripes as pop’s most lovable curios. Ironically, though, it seems their success was the reason for the band going on “semi-permanent hiatus” and prompting Brewis to go it alone with new project, School of Language.

“I haven’t done anything by myself for years,” he admits. “I remember when Peter [brother and co-founder of Field Music] went away to university and it was the first time I’d been like, ‘Right, I don’t have a band anymore, what should I do?’ So I started going to buskers’ clubs and playing on my own. It’s a challenge but I like making music that’s more stripped back and sparse.”

Brewis’s indiscriminate editing is present at every juncture of debut album, Sea From Shore, with guitar riffs gifted a no-frills focus and vocal loops used to stretch vowels into unfathomable new sounds.

“I’m very preoccupied by the gap between words and perceived meanings and the way communication is so easy to distort,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to use your critical faculties to say, ‘This bit isn’t very good - it doesn’t work for me as a listener,’ and discard or work at it until it becomes the kind of music you want to hear.”

Fusing themes of inertia and aimlessness with hope and ambition, the music of School of Language is more obtuse and personal than that of Field Music. ‘Disappointment ’99’ and ‘Poor Boy’ take guarded swipes at the mechanics of the music industry, whereas ‘Marine Life’ and ‘Rockist Part 1’ find Brewis ruminating on misplaced trust.

He confides that a big part of his job now is trying to get his music heard by people other than those who have been directed to it via Field Music.

“It’s a difficult task and that’s why it’s important to let Field Music rest for a while,” he says. “The process of us all doing different things has affected our way of thinking about how it would work. If we were to do another album, it would have to be like The White Album. We’d just throw everything in there.”