Field Dress

Hailing from Austin, TX, Field Dress is an experimental project from Brent Sluder of Prayer for Animals and DENS and Nick Cornetti of Cartright and American Sharks. Their self-released debut, Holy Field, exhibits the intimacy of lo-fi bedroom pop, but with a distinctly avant-garde twist. It’s music that eschews structure and accessibility while shrouded in mystery.
Instrumental opener “Verbs” is a three-and-a-half-minute ocean of heavily distorted, desolate noise driven along by a throbbing rhythm that forebodes sinister happenings ahead. “Spiral Arms” brings faint, effect-laden vocals that put the “harm” back into harmonies. For most bands, “Spiral Arms” would be a baffling selection for a single, but for Field Dress, it’s the catchiest song on Holy Field. Music with post-rock and drone leanings tends to be elongated, but surprisingly, the majority of Holy Field’s 11 tracks are around the traditional three minutes in length for pop songs, ranging from the sub-two-minute “Miniatures” (pun probably intended) to the sprawling epic of clattering discordance that is “Landscaped”.

Holy Field noticeably lulls in its middle section, with the exception of the Animal Collective-channeling “Spoonbending”, but returns to the inscrutable, yet captivating, promise of its opening tracks with the disconcerting chants of “Curious Motion”. To label Field Dress as “psychedelic” is appropriate enough, but it’s too general of a term. Holy Field is more akin to taking a couple magic mushrooms too many and having sensory input so warped and overloaded that connection with reality is severed. The debut of Field Dress is one of those challenging albums that’s not for everyone, but it has some rewarding moments for those accustomed to more avant styles.

Essential Tracks: “Verbs”, “Landscaped” - Frank Mojica, Consequence of Sound, 11/17/11

Totally psyched-out after listening to this "cloudsurf/krauthop" tune by Austin, Texas outfit Field Dress. This is rather experimental and kinda dark but also strangely catchy in all its noisy lo-fi demeanor, a combination that will always convince the folks over here at the NFOP offices, even on a Friday night when they should be out having some lush times in this big old city. Spiral Arms is the first single off the forthcoming debut full-length Holy Field which will be dropped August 3 "through the usual outlets", which we guess means bandcamp, and probably somewhere else though (so far) there's no label - Henning, NO FEAR OF POP (Berlin/Oslo) 6/24/11

“Austin’s Brent Sluder aka Field Dress is a little like AnCo in a blender but like, the best blender; the blender that can blend smart cars into an insufflable dust that cures all forms of death. How does he do it?” - Gold Sweatshirt

“This Austin project sounds to me like a product of one of Brian Wilson’s manic episodes, had he been locked in a room with 2012 computers and instruments. Songwriter Brent Sluder tells me this is a “weird, summery optimistic song for us poor saps who suffer the burden of dreams (creative people) all year round.” - Mark Schoenveld, YVYNYL