Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There

- Nearly a year after their breakthrough debut, the Cambridgeshire originating Black Country, New Road return with Ants From Up There. Seamlessly blending contemporary classical, math rock and even ska, Black Country might look and sound more like a Wes Anderson cast than the hottest rock band on the other side of the equator, but you best believe that LP2 more than attests to the hype and acclaim of their debut.

Contrary to For The First Time, their first album, Ants From Up There opens with less spectacle, less intensity. Instead, the record builds its ferociousness, slowly and smoothly. Chaos Space Marine and Concorde kick off the album with a ska-tinged, folk-rock atmosphere. Slowly though, the album grows in intensity. Bread Song, a highlight of Ants, may find its name in reference to Breadcrumb Trail by Slint, a sure influence for Black Country’s tense and taut math rock. As singer Isaac Wood comments in spoken word, “I never felt the crumbs, until you said, this place is not for any man nor particles of bread.”

Like their first record, Ants From Up There is the disintegration of genre, and the record’s most interesting moments reflect that. Good Will Hunting, a moody gem at the record’s middle, opens with a droning synthesizer barely removed from the work of Beach House. As the track continues, this synth recurs, sharper and more grinding as it performs a more daunting reprise. Eventually, the song explodes into a tortured and distorted shriek. Yet amidst the madness, there’s still room for something meta. In one of a few mentions to other artists, Wood comments, “Everyone will say it was cool, she had Billie Eilish style.” The other -in the record’s magnum opus, twelve-minute long closer Basketball Shoes- though watered down compared to their live shows, is a still very sexualised reference to Charli XCX.

Basketball Shoes, in its booming sludge rock and quiet whispers, is emblematic of the album’s sonic shifts and labyrinthine nature. Back and forth between the explosive and the minimal, it would be jarring if it wasn’t exactly what you’d hope Black Country would engineer out of pure chaos. To close with the longest track on the record allows the song to act as a kind of splashboard, a manifestation of every single one of the strands and flavours of all the other tracks, recapitulating, concluding together.

Ants From Up There, is exactly what you’d hope a sophomore album from one of the UK’s most exhilarating bands would be. Experimental, wild, yet with all its crazy elements subsumed by the stylish whole. Other art-rock bands can only look on in jealousy, wishing they could let it all hang out there and still maintain such tight control, like Black Country, New Road.

- Sean Tayler.