The Field

Yesterday & Today

(Anti-/Kompakt)

Record Review by Alex Pudlin

Judged against The Field’s stunning 2007 debut From Here We Go To Sublime, it’s tempting to call Axel Willner’s follow-up Yesterday & Today a sideways step at best. Whereas most of Sublime’s songs locked the listener into a trance-like groove only to twist the tables with a few seconds of stark funk or soul, Yesterday’s tracks often feel stuck in a perpetual loop. Perhaps Sublime just packed so many ideas and directions under the rubric of “electronic” music, that anything else superficially comes off as an auditory sleeping pill. So let’s forget Sublime completely and deal with the six song, sixty-minute Yesterday & Today as its own beast. Is it still such a bore? That all depends on your activity, honestly. Far too interesting to pass as background music yet repetitive enough to make even the most patient listener’s mind wander every now and then, Yesterday & Today is an album best enjoyed in those moments when  listeners are in perpetual loops of their own.

Yesterday & Today has the sort of magic that may not hit you unless you have weed smoke flowing into your lungs. A track like “Leave It” offers the listener little more than a thumping bass and cascades of chimes. Yet if you can force yourself to focus on each glockenspiel’s precise notes, you’ll hear the patterns consistently change ever so slightly. If you allow yourself to detect this shift, you’ll slip deep into the song’s clutches in now time. Unfortunately most of us don’t have that type of dedication. Unless mind altering substances are involved. So is The Field just another Keller Williams, plucking away at his strings, blowing hippie minds one jam at a time? Is this merely an electronic version of Phish on New Year’s Eve? Not quite. But if you try to throw this on while you’re doing dishes or reading the newspaper,  the slight variations in percussive clicks on “Yesterday & Today” may fly right over you. In that sense, it’s all about your mind, man.

With the exception of the gorgeously poppy “Everybody’s Got to Learn Something” (which comes off as a Virgin Suicides soundtrack outtake),  Yesterday & Today functions like a revolving restaurant.  Unless you stare as you eat, you won’t see it moving.  Furthermore, Willner’s songs on Yesterday & Today often sound like they start in the middle. Or maybe they don’t start at all. You arrive in the moment. It’s not just stoner music but rather the ideal soundtrack for people who can analyze their own hypnosis. Say, folks who like to lie in bed and relax without falling asleep; gym rats who run at the same mid-level speed on the treadmill for an hour; urban gazers who watch traffic patterns or weather  radar. 

To the average person, this may all seem intolerable. But if you’re patient enough to stare at the spinning circles for long enough, you will have more than enough rewards to show for the effort. “The More That I Do” has a ferocious drive compared to the rest of the album’s mellow vibe and  “I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet” spends its final two minutes sans beat, with nothing but synth pad noises repeated.  And for those who require more bounce, check out the ending of the “Yesterday and Today” a techno-funk breakdown  that comes out nowhere.  Perhaps Yesterday & Today isn’t that different from From Here We Go To Sublime after all. It just takes the uncanny ability to suspend yourself between sleep and wakefulness to appreciate the progression.