You have to feel for Black Country, New Road. Their debut album - For The First Time, hit the streets just before the pandemic hit. Any plans to tour promoting it had to be cancelled. Through social media/ word of mouth alone they found themselves one of the breakthrough acts of 2021. By the time they were able to tour they'd already recorded their second album. But were touring with material from the first. Material which by then felt dated and old hat to them.
This February 2022, their second album -Ants From Up There, has been released, and a tour planned. In the very week it hit the airwaves their lead singer and main word smith Issac Woods, announces he's leaving the band, citing mental health issues. Their musical career trajectory seems bedevilled by atrociously bad timing.
Black Country, New Road are not your standard three minute pop song merchants. They draw and meld their sound from an ever broadening pallete of influences and musical sources:-jazz, minimalism, post punk, post rock, music hall. The last track on the album Basketball Shoes, all twelve minutes plus of it, veers through all sort of vibrant colours and moods. Shifting around, circling all over the place, like a fairground helter skelter, but as a finale it's a real anthemic joyride.
Issac Woods is a difficult person to stand in for, let alone replace. His strained, wired, fragile vocals are a major element in what makes Black Country, New Road the edgy exciting entity they are. Listen to Wood's lyrics and maybe that sort of intensity has come at some personal cost. Reminiscent of early David Byrne, there is a lot of pained self awareness in his expressiveness. Imagine if you had to face replicating that on stage everyday for weeks on end.
His departure, whilst a bit of a blow, was perhaps not that unexpected. Woods was always conspicuous by his absence from media interviews. Maybe the rest of the band got tired of always speaking up for him. One band member once acknowledged that Woods lyrics often baffled the rest of the band. Not always getting what the hell he was wailing so passionately about?
He's the classic loner, creating a world entirely of his own making, one only he fully understands. Yet whilst his lyrics often remain a tiny bit opaque, they are simultaneously suffused with a real and relatable melancholy beauty. As on the tumbling drum backed Snow Globes.
So transfixed can you be by Woods up front ,you forget how so much of the 'schitzo' propulsion originates from the band behind him. The 'klesma' influences of the first album diminishing, being replaced by fully embracing the delights of a vaudville vamp. Some tracks reminded me of Taxi by Deaf School, a sadly neglected art school band from pre-punk mid seventies. BCNR make a lot of use of lurching guitar grunge arising out of the slightest of minimalist repetitive motif. The musical tone and intensity has been refined by a notch or two. The result feels distinctly melody infused as a result. Woods sounds more human, balanced and approachable. His fragility on 'Concorde' is touching as he describes the decline of a relationship with someone once so vivacious and lively. Its just glorious.
Their indebtedness through anthemic example to Arcade Fire is more apparent. The big dramatic and accelerating eruptions the large inspiring orchestrated panoramas. Just a tinge of those other Canadians, Godspeed You! Black Emperor thrown in, when the mearest lyrical wisp of a violin soundscape, can slip gently into slabs of high amped feedback and the sheer joy of noise making. This is all a very carefully controlled recreation of a post rock version of exhileration and mayhem. The truly terrific waltz infused - The Place Where He Inserted The Blade - bares an uneasy poignancy.
Black Country, New Road, have easily negotiated there way through 'the difficult second album'. The debut was not a one off fluke after all. They've refined, refreshed, broadened and improved on that. Where of course they go from here, post Wood's departure, is now an open question. Because - Ants From Up There, is for me pretty damn near perfect. I'll confidently predict some of my favourite musical moments of 2022 will come from this album, and we are only two months in.
CARROT REVIEW - 7/8
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