Welcome to twelve artist Wednesday! Still just the three songs, though…
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[6.56]
Nortey Dowuona: Tariq Al-Sabir’s voice is so tranquil and ethereal it seems to be the wrong one to anchor the song. Polachek and Caesar have more recognizable and easy to pinpoint voices, and drift in and out of the song quite happily as Vini Reilly and cTm pluck, strum and drift gently above Blood Orange’s warm chords and softly compressed percussion. As you listen to the song, it becomes clearer why: both Caesar and Polachek are attention hogs as singers. It would be very easy and very trite to have one or both sing this song. But Polachek and EVA drift in to assert then drift out, and Caesar is only allowed to riff. Al-Sabir’s voice, rendered ghostly and thin, takers center stage. Its tender nature pulls the heartstrings through its vulnerability, compassion and sincerity. You long to hear it. You wish the other vocalists would recede so Al-Sabir can emerge, his tender earnestness weakening your innate defensiveness.
[8]
Ian Mathers: I approached “The Field” with some skepticism! Surely this was too many cooks for this particular broth, and while Hynes has made some great songs over the years, for me he’s a bit hit or miss. But this doesn’t feel at all disjointed, muddled, or lacking in impact; if anything, I feel like I could stretch out in this song for an hour or more. Is there going to be a whole album like this? Could there be?
[8]
Jel Bugle: An awful lot of people on something that I find mildly diverting at best, a bit annoying at worst. Clanky acoustic guitars, string flashes, found sounds, chippy beats, dreamy vocals: if this kind of music didn’t already exist in a million different versions… but it does!
[5]
Alfred Soto: A track to, as a student might say, chillax to, though those credits are complex enough to remind me of Brian Eno bargaining with Talking Heads over songwriting.
[7]
Katherine St. Asaph: The drum-and-bass beat is practically load-bearing; without it, “The Field” would be so much amorphous nothing.
[6]
Julian Axelrod: For a song with five vocalists and a myriad of movements, it’s amazing how “The Field” feels so simple and fluid without betraying its contributors. After the intro couplet, Dev Hynes mostly steps back and lets his chorus of voices braid together and bounce off each other, with Vini Reilly’s serene guitar sample grounding a sprawling sea of strings, skittering drums and nature noises. (According to WhoSampled, The Durutti Column has only been sampled seven times?? Do the rap producers of the world know there’s a deep well of instrumental guitar pieces waiting to be repurposed for a Rod Wave song?) Each singer gets their distinct moment to shine, but it never devolves into a series of dueling solos: Tariq Al-Sabir contributes a star-making turn, Daniel Caesar delivers his most restrained vocal yet, and Caroline Polachek continues a run of features and loosies that have made her the 2 Chainz of 2025 indie rock. This isn’t the first Blood Orange song to cram in a raft of big-name features, but it’s the first time the guest list feels integral to a larger vision.
[8]
Iain Mew: Unobtrusive chill that for all its many voices lands somewhere quite close to the instrumental effect of The Field. Looking forward to him coming back with a track called “Blood Orange”.
[5]
Taylor Alatorre: I remember pressing play on The Return of the Durutti Column for the first time, expecting based on the name to hear something like the propulsive post-punk polemic of Gang of Four, or at least Wire or Magazine. Instead: wordless proto-chillout music, with any ideological angles subsisting largely on listener input. Names being what they are, my mind still invariably turns to leftist politics whenever I encounter the band, and I imagine if Vini Reilly had any problem with this he would’ve changed the name long ago. The foregrounding of the Durutti Column in the credits list for “The Field,” unusual but not unheard-of for an artist that’s merely sampled, thus serves a purpose beyond respectful homage or cool-guy namedropping. It places Blood Orange in the select lineage of jittery punksters who turned to softness as a release valve, as an alternative to the alternative, who saw no conflict between an introverted mode of expressionism and the more communal or utopian dreams they held close to the heart. If “The Field” is “about” anything, it’s about the radical possibilities for change — be that personal or political, cottagecore or YIMBY — that remain for the taking even when the more conventional paths have been closed off. The title and minimalist lyrics both point to cyclical renewal as a theme, and the organic build-up of voices models in real time the creation of a new, parallel society. Less obvious is the meaning of the hard-cut bar of silence, which is perhaps the point: your lived experience fills in the blank. For me, its power lies in the fact that you instinctively and immediately know that this isn’t the song’s end, that the line extends past the darkness: la lotta continua.
[9]
Mark Sinker: Nobbut signifiers round here back when i were a lad
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