As a person whose emotions tend to reach hyperbolic states, extending branches of sadness or happiness into an unknown level of the cosmos, I reach out for music that taps into these wordless, unnamed states. “I am an emotional person,” seems to be a dingy excuse to those who know me, who have become accustomed to the romantic notions of sentiments that I conjure at a whimsical conversation, a picture drafted by an artist’s hysteria.
This is why I’ve turned repeatedly to Foreign Fields, the Wisconsin transplants whose musical constructions traverse the terrain of these colorful, passionate landscapes with a magnificent, eery precision. Their first album, Anywhere But Where I Am, painted the confusions that accompany a lost world – one in which our internal selves fail to connect with the concrete realities in which we’ve been thrust. In ways, it’s the captivating numbness of detachment, born out of an inability to align the pieces of a newfound puzzle.
With their single “Little Lover,” Foreign Fields preserves the staples of their electronic folk that drew us into Anywhere But Where I Am. But the song is more fleshed out in its emotions, more cohesive, a deeper exploration of all those unnamed places we visit. The song reads with the strength of a classical piece; with a tight reign on dynamics, Eric Hillman pulls his falsetto to an alluringly muted spot at the end of each phrase, mimicking the ebb and flow of soulful understanding. “Little Lover” remains harmonically and melodically complex, but accessible in the minimalism of its lyrical content. “This album is heavier for me,” says Brian Holl. “It has more lyrical weight, and I believe overall more effort in answering “why.” With an advocacy of the writing approach “less is more,” the song evokes the complexity of personal relationships through a defined instrumental aesthetic. The song is careful and reserved, but never tedious, rupturing with that other-worldly sense of sentiment to which Foreign Fields has always been attuned.
Watch the video for “Little Lover” below, and keep checking back with us as we chronicle the release of their anticipated second album.
Lockeland Springsteen 