Pitchfork

Glamorous decadence is probably the last thing of which you'd accuse David Brewis, the frontman for tidy UK art-pop trio Field Music and the solo artist behind School of Language. Field Music's two quite good albums each brim with melodic complexity and herky-jerk time changes, but they're always immaculately precise; this polite, restive perfectionism carries over to Field Music's live shows, as well. School of Language's new Sea From Shore finds Brewis dirtying up his sound some, but still, pretty much everything about his presentation seems in contrast to the famously glittery Roxy Music, whose 1972 self-titled debut's "If There Is Something" Brewis covers here as School of Language. Everything except a certain quintessential Englishness and, you know, the music: multi-part, stylized, catchy. Brewis tosses out the honky-tonk keyboard, strips the twang from the guitars, and jettisons the atmospheric saxophone solo for a concise, detail-packed track that sounds impeccably like one of his own. While still hardly decadent, it's a smart update of a classic song by some of Brewis' most influential UK art-pop forebears.

MP3:> School of Language: "If There Is Something"
[Sea From Shore is out now on Thrill Jockey]