Red Mosquito

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01 This Guy's In Love With You
 02 Fragment Two
 03 The Light In Your Name
 04 V (Island Song)
 05 Spiral
 06 Organ Eternal
 07 Nothing Else
 08 Dream
 09 Field of Reeds

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On their surprising new LP, the UK art-rockers replace the percussive assault of 2010's Hidden with modern classical flourishes, Portuguese singing, and more.

 With its pounding Taiko drums and battleship-sonorous horns, These New Puritans' second album, 2010's Hidden, took the elements of an aggressive maelstrom and made them more terrifying in crystal clear isolation; the kind of record you'd listen to when walking down a back alley at midnight in order to assume some of its powerful ferocity. But during the press rounds after its release, frontman Jack Barnett and his twin brother/drummer George often said that their next move would find them taking on "Disney pop" and employing a female eastern European singer. A year later, though, Jack told NME that the plan was off: "I've realised I actually hate pop music. Most people don't like good music, so there's no point trying to do something for them."

 If a Jonas Brothers-style record seemed like a bizarre follow-up, then the forthcoming Field of Reeds is almost as much of a curveball. It takes until two minutes into the third song, "The Light in Your Name", for any semblance of propulsive percussion to make an appearance, doing away with what had arguably become These New Puritans' defining trait. (As becomes clear when talking to Jack one afternoon in early May, These New Puritans are not interested in maintaining "defining traits.") Here, they seem more like a modern classical ensemble than the quote-unquote band they once were; composers Hans Ek (who scored the music to the original Swedish version of Let the Right One In), Phillip Sheppard, and Michel van der Aa wrote with Jack on the album, along with an enormous cohort of session musicians largely sourced and conducted by Andre de Ridder, who collaborated with the band on their expanded, orchestral live shows in late 2011.

 Produced by Jack and Graham Sutton, Field of Reeds has an eerie, serene melodic purity that recalls Talk Talk arranging a Benjamin Britten piece, though executed with a vanguard approach: its silvery tone comes courtesy of a magnetic resonator piano never before used in commercial recordings, along with a set of 24 chromatically pitched Thai "nipple" gongs, the wings of a real Harris hawk, and the sound of smashing glass. The unsettling feel continues with forlorn singing from Jack, a decidedly non-angelic children's choir, basso profundo vocal tremors from Adrian Peacock (who has the lowest known voice in Britain), and Portuguese Fado vocalist Elisa Rodrigues.

 Written in Essex and Amsterdam, recorded in London, Berlin, and Gloucester, it's an unnervingly emotional record that manages to conjure the misty flats off the band's native Essex coast as much as the ominous feel easily associated with traditional "Berlin records." Although Jack says there's no intentional link between Field of Reeds and its predecessor, it seems to make sense as the stilled aftermath of Hidden's battlefields, his lyrical focus moving from vast topics like nature and numerology to a more intimate enclave.