Photo credit: Josh Cheuse
I had a hard time with “Never Look Back” at first. The first single from Field Report’s new album Summertime Songs was almost too much—too sunny, too chipper, too blunt about announcing the Milwaukee folk-rock band’s intentions of reinventing themselves as something far more approachable. And then, of course, like pretty much everybody else who heard it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was one of those songs I came to love the more I didn’t hear it. It cheered me up just thinking about it.
I still think it’s a little much sometimes, but the track complements everything else on Summertime Songs, an unapologetically upbeat, bear hug of an album that’s never quite as saccharine as I feared it would be. In some ways Field Report's third record is an update of a great, half-forgotten tradition: the crossover heartland rock album. Back in the ’80s, radio was filled with big, crowd-pleasing anthems by John Mellencamp, Bob Seger and Tom Petty, guys who sounded like they’d been plucked right out of the cornfields and dropped onto MTV, and there was something electric about hearing those earthy, untamed voices pit against chiming pop production. Instead of replicating the booming ’80s aesthetic of those throwbacks, though, band leader Chris Porterfield has channeled the spirit of those LPs into an album that’s decidedly modern, even a little experimental in its own way, without sacrificing the integral intimacy of his previous efforts.
The result is a hell of a headphone record. Over the years Porterfield has padded Field Report’s lineup with some of the most purely gifted musicians in the city: guitarist/keyboardist Thomas Wincek of All Tiny Creatures and Volcano Choir, bassist Barry Paul Clark of the adventurist classical outfit Tontine Ensemble and the brilliantly turbulent electronic project adoptahighway, and drummer Devin Drobka, of seemingly every live Milwaukee jazz performance that’s made my jaw drop over the last three or four years. No matter how immediate these clear-eyed songs are, the music that accompanies them is rich, lush and deceptively complicated, filled with all these little flourishes you can still get lost in long after Porterfield’s choruses have borrowed their way into your head. And for as big and bright as this music is, there isn’t a song here that you can’t imagine Porterfield performing solo, for a motionless, seated crowd in a living room silenced by his breaking voice and poignant pauses. It’s really an achievement.
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Summertime Songs is streaming now on all the usual services; we've embedded the Spotify stream below. The band will play a pair of local album release shows next month at the Back Room at Colectivo on April 20 and 22. Ahead of them, you can read a wonderfully in-depth profile on the new record from Joey Grihalva for the Wisconsin Gazette, and watch an insightful making-of video about the album on Radio Milwaukee's website.
