Recommended Listening

If you're anything like me, you get worried after you discover a new, spectacularly good album. Yeah, this one is great, but what about the next? Can its creator make lightning strike twice? I've wondered about this ever since I first found The Field's astounding techno-trance-crossover record From Here We Go Sublime. It remains one of my all-time favorite albums, but its formula and ingredients are so easy to dissect (micro-samples of old pop songs, gauzy electronic filter sweeps and barely-danceable percussion) I was seriously concerned that its follow-up would be either more of the same, or a series of jumbled missteps. The Field's contribution to 2008's Pop Ambient collaboration reinforced these fears- it's a pretty tune that wouldn't sound at all out of place on Sublime, but also did absolutely nothing new.

It was with profound joy and relief, then, that I discovered that Axel Willner's sophmore LP is neither a bland retread nor a catastrophic retooling. The album opens with a gradual fade-in of the standard loops and ambient chords, backed by an insistent reversed drum beat. This first track takes a good four minutes to really get going, but once the "real" drums kick in, it all snaps into place. The track rewards as classic minimalism, as well- listen closely and you discover tons of different layers fading in and out, new chords and dissonances previously unheard in The Field's music. It's a tentative but effective modulation of the sounds we became familiar with on Sublime, and it's the most subtle track Willner has produced to date.

Track two is a total curveball- a (fairly) straight-forward cover of a pop tune that eventually dissolves into a wash of long chords. It sounds like The Field covering an Air song, or vice versa, and it's completely different from anything he's done before. I was initially thrown, but after repeat listens, it's starting to make sense as a deliberate artistic decision (more on that later).

Track three ("Leave It") is as close to straight-up trance as The Field has gone, and like the album opener takes a few minutes to really get started. In this case, the big change comes when a DFA-esque bassline and delayed snare hits fade in around minute 3, and the backing chords fall into one of Willner's trademark back-forth progressions. Once all the elements are in place, the song is content to power along essentially unchanged for another 8 minutes- it's a little much if you're sitting there actively listening to it, but it works great as the backing track to whatever you're doing (drawing comics, for example).

Track four, "Yesterday and Today," is where the album really takes off, and where we begin to see some sure intimations of where Willner could take his sound from here on. It opens with (you guessed it) more gauzy sample-trance, but after 2 1/2 minutes, drops abruptly into a chopped vocal riff that would be right at home on a Daft Punk record. But instead of cranking up the distortion and glimmer into a pop-techno anthem, The Field slowly brings in the filter sweeps, ticking percussion, and microsamples. Then, just when you think the song has done everything it's going to do, a NEW section sneaks in that, again, references US dance acts like LCD Soundsystem, !!!, and The Juan MacLean.

"The More I Do" brings us back to more familiar ground, albeit with a heavier beat than anything The Field ever did on Sublime, and from there we segue into the most intriguing song on the album, "Sequenced." It's a MONSTER- deep, vintagey synth line pumped up by hot-as-fuck live drums, a slick bassline, and gorgeous backing chords that sound equal parts fog- and French-horn. I hear a ton of !!! influence in this track, and can only imagine how hard it must slay live. It eventually morphs into a major-key album-ending cooldown that leaves me utterly satisfied, every time.

My initial-listen Twitter synopsis of Yesterday & Today was that the first half of the album is relatively forgettable and the real meat was in the monster second half, but the longer I listen to it as a whole, the more I'm convinced of its overall viability. Not only are the first three songs serious growers, they help cement the central theme of this album: transition. Each track seems to present a different direction The Field could go in, from subtle modifications to the formula that worked so well on Sublime, to misty covers of other people's tunes, to DFA-esque live-band dance jams. Almost every track morphs into something very different from its beginning section, often multiple times. And there's no denying that at least two of these songs (the titular fourth track and "Sequenced," specifically) are out-and-out masterpieces. It's more subtle, and more muscular, than anything Willner's previous work, and it rewards close listening in a way that very little on Sublime did.

Yesterday & Today isn't a case of lightning striking twice, it's a case of Axel Willner building a monster Tesla coil and directing the lightning where he wants it to go. I can't wait to hear what he does next.