When we were talking about Coldplay the other day, one of the regulars, Jamesewan, posted some thoughts which suggested that the British music scene “has been in a kind of depression for a while now.” It’s not something I worry about a great deal, to be honest, since I don’t really care where the records I like come from – and they usually come from America, realistically.

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But as a matter of interest, I had a look through the blog archives and discovered a surprisingly large number of British artists – 18, I reckon – have been covered on Wild Mercury Sound this year. And to that list, today, we can add one more: The Week That Was.

The Week That Was is a new project from Peter Brewis, who’s also a key player in the Sunderland band, Field Music. Over the last couple of years, the amount of laudatory press directed towards Field Music (and towards another spin-off, School Of Language) has left me intrigued but a little baffled. Self-consciously complex, a sort of chamber pop correlative to their fellow travellers The Futureheads, they seemed to demand deeper investigation, but never quite encouraged it.

The first, self-titled Week That Was album has finally snared me, though. In many ways, it’s not the sort of thing I often go for, since it fetishises a certain prissy sound from the ‘80s, all Fairlights and Linn drums, and references to Peter Gabriel in the press biog. It’s interesting, though, that a lot of the ‘New Pop’ (dreadful disingenuous phrase) that Brewis references is not ABC, the Trevor Horn/ZTT pomp and so on, but the stuff I rather like: Scritti Politti, Prefab Sprout, Japan and especially Kate Bush (although someone here has just mentioned It Bites, which isn’t so good).

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On something as marvellous as the opener “Learn To Learn”, Brewis seems to have sneaked into a hole in time, somewhere in maybe 1982, where the mathematical awkwardness of post-punk can be given a lavish studio makeover. It’s wilfully brainy, stiff and yet immensely gripping pop music, that occasionally resolves into a fine, catchy, strings and harpsichord-augmented song like “The Airport Line”.

At other times, the fidgety melodic structures have an air of baroque prog to them (especially “Yesterday’s Paper”), and there are a couple of tracks – specifically “It’s All Gone Quiet” and “Come Home” – that suggest a pop rethink of Tortoise. “It’s All Gone Quiet”, especially, has a kind of systems gamelan thing going on which reminds me very much of a track from “TNT” – “Iguazu Falls”, is it?

And two further comparisons. The Week That Was strike me as taking the polished raw materials of the more adventurous ‘80s pop, then reinventing them, in a way which isn’t utterly unlike two firm favourites round these parts, Wild Beasts and Yeasayer. I need to go back to those Field Music records, I think. . .