Episodic, the third full length from Field Mouse, is what I usually group into the “crowdpleaser” genre of album, with me being the crowd. Because as much as I enjoy trying to key in on specific things I love in music and being hyper-critical about everything, at the end of the day, I’m pretty happy if a band delivers nice melodies, plays the guitars pretty loud, and has a good singer.
Field Mouse does all of that: they play a melodic, straight-forward amalgam of basically every style of 90s music, can get loud when they need to, and are led by Rachel Browne, a talented singer who makes their songs memorable with her clear, bright vocals. Nothing about Episodic is going to catch the listener by surprise, but part of its appeal is that it gets the fundamentals of this dreamy rock sound right, and sometimes I just want to listen to something that is really catchy and unpretentious.
This might come off as me damning Field Mouse with faint praise, but one of my takeaways from spending so much of this year on Bandcamp is that it’s much harder than I realized just to make music that is listenable, much less albums like Episodic that are nearly impossible to stop listening to.
The Noise Made By People 