These New Puritans: Field Of Reeds

FIELD OF REEDS. It's that title that holds the key to These New Puritans' third album. Fields are terra firma, wilderness tamed, human use of the soil for productivity. Reeds one might more commonly associate with liminal space between water and dry land, murky, misty... they grow in wet beds, not fields, and the juxtaposition of the two suggests to me a place unsettled and undefined, mysterious and strange, like the sets of wavy lines, symbolising reeds, set at different angles on the album's sleeve. Earth under water, earth replacing water, water reclaiming earth. "You asked if the island would float away," as Jack Barnett sings on the title track, and album's end.