Black Country, New Road: ‘Ants From Up There’ Review
9.0
GENRE: Rock/Experimental
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2022The most intriguing music comes from people who truly love music with, you know, every fiber of their being. On Ants From Up There, the second album by Black Country, New Road, you can feel this intense feeling coming from every member of the band—it radiates through the waves of all the songs. Their music still sounds intentionally raw and unedited, just like it did on their debut full-length For the First Time, but there is an unshakable feeling that their skills have become more elevated and their intent more serious. The silence in between instruments sounds slyly orchestrated by the seven musicians who, at this point, have spent enough time together to know when vocalist Isaac Wood will drop a word that has never been rehearsed. Such a high level of synchrony makes Ants From Up There a successful collage of oddities, a rewarding experiment with flutes, violins, saxophone, drums, keyboards, bass, and guitars—all grouped in improbable arrangements by one of the most idiosyncratic bands of the present day.
Black Country, New Road blew minds away with their 2021 debut full-length, For the First Time. Their first album was full of musical references, with lyrics that directly name-dropped acts like Kanye West and black midi, and even cleverly semi-quoted Phoebe Bridgers’ “Motion Sickness.” Listening to their first record, one gets the gist: these musicians are music fans. Just like us, they have their influences and favorite artists, they go to concerts, and they obsess over albums like Stranger in the Alps and Schlagenheim. And they are fortunate enough to make music. On Ants From Up There, released one year later after their debut full-length, the seven-piece ensemble sounds fully aware that they, too, have become musicians people look up to. They are still experimenting with exhaustion and having fun with cultural references old and new (Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, movies from the 90s, supersonic jets from the 80s), but their rough-around-the-edges material has been sharpened as if the group has just started to take themselves more seriously.
Looking at the album cover, you see the miniature of a Concorde inside a little plastic bag resting on a hook on the wall. Once a symbol of speed, luxury, opulence, and power, the supersonic jet became a synonym for sunk-cost fallacy and scientific failure; the jet is now sold as a souvenir at Heathrow Airport for a mere few pounds. But on the track “Concorde,” Wood uses the plane as a metaphor to describe someone who he is willing to climb a mountain just to get a fast glimpse of, even if the person cannot see him from up there—a concept that ties up with the album title. This feeling of nostalgia and longing is revisited throughout the album, with lines like “I tried my best to hold you through the headset that you wear” on “Breadsong” and “In my mind, we summer in France” on “Good Will Hunting,” a song titled after the 1997 movie staring Ben Affleck. On “Haldern,” Wood sings of a lover who couldn’t stay—not even in spirit—and “rose out through the cеiling,” tracking back to the flying metaphor used on “Concorde” and revisited in the summarizing closing track “Basketball Shoes” (“Concorde flies in my room/tears the house to shreds/defines the night as such”).
The Concorde metaphor also presaged the future of the voice of the band. “And though England is mine/I must leave it all behind,” Wood sings in the first two lines of “Chaos Space Marine,” referencing The Smiths in a song about the duality of escapism. The upbeat, progressive pop song foreshadowed his departure from the band only four days before the release of the album—their second together—a saddening event before introducing such a glorious record to the world. But with a group so perfectly in tune, it’s easy to assume that they will rebound. Their synchrony overflows through talent and technique on their impeccable sophomore record, and it is exciting to wait for what the band will do next. For now, we’ve got Ants From Up There, a record on which they didn’t abandon the forward-thinking post-punk attitude that propelled them to fame—just made it more accessible. And that’s more than enough.
Listen to Ants From Up There:
