Album review: These New Puritans, Field Of Reeds (Infectious)

This third offering from These New Puritans is distinctly uneasy listening. Poised on the cusp of indie and classical, there is a laborious, tortuous formality about songs such as “Fragment Two” and “V”, with their peculiar, jerky time-signatures and lowering orchestrations.

Everything seems a portent – the stalking piano, the grimly lowing bowed bass. But in places, the elements combine gloriously in original ways, such as the deep bass-baritone burr of the choir in “Field Of Reeds” and the clarinet passage in “Spiral”. The Talk Talk of their era.

Download: Field Of Reeds; Spiral; Organ Eternal