About Field Report
There is no sweet spot upon our delicate balances, just cheap footing and heights that will make your eyes water. The wires are everywhere, strung over the infield of a racetrack, taut across our backyards, between skyscrapers and canyons, between people, or just positioned for us to get from one morning to that coming evening light, unhit, not discombobulated. It could be that a tiny word at a meal, or the faintest of looks over wine will topple us from down below, sending us reeling, arms whipping wildly through an air that’s dead set on ripping us right through the safety net, to splatter for fate’s janitor to clean out of the lawn or carpet.
Cold wars come in a few sizes, but the warm wars -- the ones that burn and give off a fair amount of long stares and result in exasperation and quivering faces — are the ones that Christopher Porterfield of Field Report worries about on the Milwaukee, Wisconsin band’s third album, “Summertime Songs.” They’re suntanned and wind-swept. They’ve been crying and they’ve been drinking. These warm wars are the result of chaffing, of friction and boredom. They’re caused by everything and nothing at all, just guts deciding to act on a foggy and cowardly, oftentimes mistaken heart’s behalf. Some people give up and some people are given up on.
This is an album comprised of songs that are exactly what you think they might be if you’d assumed they would consist of all the nuance and cold shouldering, all of the behind closed doors dramatics and silences and all of the clusterfuckery that two people who used to love each other so madly all too often get to producing. There are no swimming pools and there’s no lemonade. There’s not even any sunblock, just the rawest of burns. There are no country club couples or tee times to deal with, but rather the kinds of nobodies we ourselves are and are surrounded by and we have to figure out how the work’s gonna get done, how we’re going to keep our clothes on, how we’re going to get someone to want to randomly take our clothes off or what can be said to put all of the pieces back together so that some form of happiness can return home.
The difference between “Summertime Songs” — recorded at Wire & Vice, in the same Milwaukee neighborhood where 3/4ths of the band resides — and 2014’s brilliantly autumnal feeling “Marigolden” and 2012’s more chilly and intense self-titled record is that we hear Porterfield at his most honed and pure. He’s more direct and effective with his writing, and in doing so, the scene is even more expertly set. It’s sharper and more captivating. The character sketches that he creates with these mostly toasty and soaring hooks gluing them together are robust and stark like a Hemingway line, but with that keen eye for all of the subtle details that always made up the sad couples in Raymond Carver’s stories.
Every song for this album was written before the 2016 presidential election, all while Porterfield was anxious about the arrival of he and his wife’s first child, but it’s easy to multi-purpose some of those anxious moments for the white-knuckler that the country’s been experiencing for over a year now. He plies us with songs about marital strife and letting that someone slip away (or watching them voluntarily pack up everything they have and get the hell out), but they’re also vehicles for a dialogue about the fragility of America and many of the ideals that it has supposedly stood or fought for for so long.
There’s a lot of that fragility to sort through these days as many of us grapple with which version of panicky cold sweat we’re dealing with each day. But where these stories take us is quite personal and not at all a conversation about all that we can’t control. These stories remind us of all that we do or did control that WE let slip away. It’s our fault usually, and we KNOW it.
Porterfield shares with us many episodes involving his problematic former days as a heavy drinker and we see those boozing buddies here, up to those old, head-banging, creme de menthe breath-reeking, tree-plowing tricks. There are the copouts and the scapegoats and the promises for change. Elsewhere, there are lovers and best friends who have been brought to places in their relationships through recklessness and abandon, blindly and selfishly finding that other body that they thought they wanted or needed more, but both parties knew all about that bag that one had packed, waiting in the closet. There’s one foot in and one foot out so often that it seems like normality. In all circumstances here, there’s a body calling for that other body not to leave, just not to leave it.
Field Report will grab you by the short hairs and make you see yourself. It will get you close enough to smell your salt and you’ll know immediately that it’s your salt, your grime -- the detritus of you. You’ll get up to that mirror and you’ll feel your breath bouncing back, hot and present, slapping you invisibly, eerily with real texture and a physicality, like it could push you back a couple inches with the next attack. You’ll recognize it and this time, you can dance and thrash through it to get out to the other end. There’s a voyeur in our midst, but they’re performance notes, constructive and hopeful, as if there’s an eye toward the remake or the redo. We’ve been watched closely and the police may have even been dialed once, but there could be something salvageable in all of our jettisoned or banged up arrangements, if only we could find our way through this quiet jitters and past our rotten tendencies to give in so easily when everything gets a little hard.
Comments
Explore Nearby
-
1
Studio Self Catering Apt Lower East Side
Hotels -
2
Spur Tree Lounge
Restaurants -
3
Corner Table Restaurants
Restaurants -
4
Escape the Room NYC - Downtown
Attractions -
5
Tribeca Park
Attractions
-
1
Studio Self Catering Apt Lower East Side
Orchard Street and Stanton Street -
2
The SunBright
140 Hester Street -
3
The Solita Soho Hotel, an Ascend Hotel Collection Member
159 Grand St -
4
Greenwich Village Apartment
100 Houston Street, Apt 2 -
5
Apartment in Chinatown
49 Catherine St -
6
One Bedroom Self-Catering Apartment - Little Italy
Mulberry Street and Broome Street -
7
Cosmopolitan Hotel - Tribeca
95 West Broadway (at Chambers) -
8
The Ludlow Hotel
180 Ludlow Street -
9
The Sohotel
341 Broome St -
10
Duane Street Hotel Tribeca
130 Duane St
-
1
Spur Tree Lounge
76 Orchard St -
2
Corner Table Restaurants
270 Lafayette St -
3
Jing Star Restaurant
27 Division St -
4
Nam Son Vietnamese Restaurant
245 Grand St Frnt 1 -
5
A-Wah Restaurant
5 Catherine St -
6
Bond Street
6 Bond St -
7
Staley-Wise Gallery
560 Broadway -
8
Bunny Chow
74 Orchard St -
9
Ken's Asian Taste
40 Bowery -
10
Shu Jiao Fu Zhou Cuisine
118 Eldridge St -
11
Meskel Ethiopian Restaurant
199 E 3rd St -
12
Tribeca Park Deli
1 Walker St -
13
Royal Seafood Restaurant
103-105 Mott St -
14
Lovely Day
196 Elizabeth St -
15
Mayahuel
304 E 6th St -
16
Sunrise Mart
494 Broome St -
17
Sofia's of Little Italy
143 Mulberry Street -
18
The Black Ant
60 2nd Ave -
19
Peasant
194 Elizabeth St -
20
Cafe Select
212 Lafayette St -
21
City Hall
131 Duane St -
22
Jane
100 W Houston St -
23
Paulaner
265 Bowery -
24
Hotel Chantelle
92 Ludlow St -
25
Il Buco
47 Bond St -
26
Onieal's Grand Street Bar & Restaurant
174 Grand St -
27
La Cerveceria
65 2nd Ave -
28
Tapeo29
29 Clinton St -
29
DBGB Kitchen and Bar
299 Bowery
-
1
Escape the Room NYC - Downtown
107 Suffolk St -
2
Tribeca Park
260 W Broadway -
3
Washington Market Park
310 Greenwich St -
4
City Hall Park
31 Chambers St -
5
Columbus Park
67 Mulberry St -
6
Merchant's House Museum
29 E 4th St -
7
Tompkins Square Park
E 7th St to E 10th St -
8
City Hall Park Manhattan NYC
Broadway at Chambers St -
9
Chatham Square Restaurant
6 Chatham Sq -
10
Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
215 Centre St -
11
Puro Wine
161 Grand St -
12
The Drawing Center
35 Wooster St -
13
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
97 Orchard St -
14
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
103 Orchard St -
15
Museum at Eldridge Street
12 Eldridge St -
16
Terroir Tribeca
24 Harrison St -
17
Nolita Wine Merchants
227 Mulberry St -
18
New Museum
235 Bowery -
19
Tompkins Square Park
500 East 9th Street -
20
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
© 2024 NYNY.com: A City Guide by Boulevards. All Rights Reserved. Advertise with us | Contact us | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Site Map