Originally published in Print, April 2022.
Black Country New Road’s second record Ants From Up There is a difficult album to review. I started by looking at each track, noting what was interesting about them, and then attempted to come to a general conclusion. I then listened to it again and again and always found something new and exciting. As I write, only a few days after it’s release, and after about ten full listens, I’m still surprised by it.
That’s not to say it’s just a fog of pretension and inscrutable lyrics, there are moments of true visceral immediacy in the album. After a short introduction, we get the album’s first single ‘Chaos Space Marine,’ a multi-movement art pop number that fulfills the band’s promise of writing three and a half minute pop songs. The tune begins with a jaunty and irreverent motif, leading into tightly wound verses propelled by repeated staccato piano chords and the band’s signature interweaving violin and saxophone counter melodies, before an explosive and anthemic chorus.. It grabs and shakes you with lyrics of incorporeal escape: “So I’m leaving this body / And I’m nevеr coming home again, yeah / I’ll bury the axе here / Between the window and the kingdom of men.”
Later in the record, the nine minute, post-rock epic, ‘Snow Globes’ reaches a deafening crescendo as the free-jazz drumming of Charlie Wayne almost drowns out singer Isaac Wood’s repeated homeric incantations: “Oh, god of weather, Henry knows / Snow globes don’t shake on their own”. From the immediate impact of these moments, more subtle elements arise after successive listens. Musical motifs are shared between songs, as well as certain lyrical ideas. The idea of the Concorde is used as an extensive metaphor throughout the record for example, most extensively dealt with in the track, aptly titled ‘Concorde.’ This is an indie folk ballad with a deceptively simple chord progression, decorated by instrumental counter melodies and riffs which are stretched across bar lengths. This gives the listener a sense of pleasant disorientation, as if gently rotating in a zero gravity chamber.
Later on, a descending bass line in 4/4 time beautifully contrasts with the rest of the instrumentation and vocals in waltz time. The ‘Concorde’ is presented as a distant object of Wood’s fascination in one of the most beautiful lyrical passages of the album: “And you, like Concorde / I came, a gentle hill racer / I was breathless / Up on every mountain / Just to look for your light / But for less than a moment / We’d share the same sky / And then Isaac will suffer / Concorde will fly.”
Also across the record are repeated allusions to bread, the Atkins diet, dug up holes and Billie Eilish — the further I listen, the more connections emerge. This leads me to believe that Ants From Up There is a concept album, not a rock opera such as Quadrophenia or The Wall but a more abstract collection of songs that complement the album as a single work, think Pet Sounds or To Pimp a Butterfly. However, right now, I’ve only a loose idea of what it’s about and a general feeling about it that’s difficult to describe. What I do know though is that this record, like all great records, still contains secrets to be revealed with time.
This album’s electric range of influences also make it a truly invigorating listen. As well as the post punk, post rock, jazz, and klezmer of their debut record, there is a definite presence of indie folk here and most interestingly, the repetitive phrasing, pulses and drones of minimalism. The music that the American contemporary classical composers such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley pioneered in the 60s and 70s. The aesthetic influence of their typical arrangements is heard in ‘Haldern’ where the repeated eight note patterns on violin is contrasted with similar but slightly different saxophone and piano motifs.
More interestingly, one of the broader philosophies of minimalism which Reich employed on ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ and Riley on ‘In C’, where the individual musicians choose when to begin playing as opposed to on a scored cue, was used in Black Country New Road’s ‘Bread Song’. This song begins with just vocals and fingerstyle guitar. However as it progresses, the other six band members join in according to their own musical intuition creating a very organic and novel arrangement for a piece of popular music.
It needs to be said that in writing this review, I have neglected to begin with what seems to be the most natural way, with the fact that just a matter of days before the album’s release, singer Isaac Wood announced his departure from the band writing in a statement:
“Together we have been writing songs and then performing them, which at times has been an incredible doing, but more now everything happens that I am feeling not so great and it means from now I won’t be a member of the group anymore.”
Like the concorde, the band as we knew it has had to fold. However, this incarnation of Black Country New Road has left a concise but wonderful body of work. While I write, I still however find myself struggling with evaluating the overall significance of Ants From Up There and overcoming any recency bias. It is true though that my instinct tells me that this record is truly generational, in a similar way to Pet Sounds and To Pimp a Butterfly. It succeeds in achieving seemingly opposite effects without infringing on either; it is intimate and monumental, rough hewn and precise and technical, personal and universal, gentle, and deafening. It is an astonishing album.
