This double CD caught my attention when I was in Heartland, and so I ended up taking it back with me. It's a retrospective from a UK indie band on the Sarah label, from between 1988 and 1991. Most of the tracks follow an indie-pop formula, and do so well: jangly guitars and quiet, subtly anxious vocals, in a wash of lush reverb, underscored with driving basslines. And then there's the occasional electronic track which takes the listener by surprise; in one synth-and-drum-machine-driven track, I half-expected to hear Bernard Sumner's voice start singing. (The vocal didn't sound like Barney, though there was a rather Peter Hook-esque bassline a bit later in that song.) In fact, one critic described The Field Mice as "Kraftwerk meets The Go-Betweens".

The Field Mice were contemporaries of the shoegazer scene of the late 80s/early 90s, and the zeitgeist shows; though there isn't much in the way of guitar feedback and MBV-esque noise. It's a more subtle, plaintive affair, perhaps reminiscent of Soul Whirling Somewhere (or, more probably, vice versa). The double CD also comes with a thick booklet giving a history of the band, written by an ex-Sarah staffer (and ex-gf of one of the original band members), and capturing the UK indie scene of the time.

Not the cheapest 2CD (given that it's a UK import, and stands little chance of getting locally released), but worth getting, or at least checking out. This is good music for quiet, introspective moods, and a lot better than most of the mass-market UK "indie" of the 1990s.