Giraffe and Lucy loved each other loud and hard. They annoyed everybody with their love. When the rest of the dinner party had drifted into silence, each guest working hard to pick up a thread that might keep the evening going, the two of them would just gape at each other, making goofy faces, happy as hell. Their love was legendary and sometimes when they got drunk they’d tell everybody just how legendary it was. Together they were going to put the world right. The dinner invitations stopped coming. Didn’t matter, they sold everything and moved to Detroit. Nobody minded very much and it wasn’t until she started turning up in the newspapers that people realized something was wrong.

The Field – Love Vs. Distance
(from Things Keep Falling Down 12″. Kompakt, 2005)
The Field has finally worked me over. At first listen, it struck me as a rich man’s Orbital or Underworld: a tricked-out variation on loopy, early 1990s living room trance. And I kept coming back to it despite the shades of guilt for enjoying something so saccharine, something draped with dreamy female oohs and ahhs that hit right when you expect they would and melodies that rise and fall just like you think they should. Would From Here We Go Sublime make as much noise if it wasn’t vetted by the Kompakt logo? Probably. The album title alone is that good. Underneath the gloss, there’s something else at work and I can’t decide if it’s a knowing wink or a dead-straight earnestness. This earlier 12″, Things Keep Falling Down, puts any thoughts of genre or gimmick to rest. The man is honing in on something big and emotional here. Queue the melodrama; The Field stays on repeat.