Black Country, New Road: For The First Time

- In England, there’s a highway called Black Country New Road, a historic road that travels through the countryside, connecting England’s West Midlands like veins and arteries connect organs to the heart. It’s how the many members of the avant-garde, post-punk band Black Country, New Road -For the First Time is one of the only records in recent memory to feature fewer tracks than members of the band- came to be connected too.

Boomers have long been criticising the diminishing attention spans of Gen Z, yet here the seven members of Black Country New Road take advantage of this spontaneity to transform the sound of their debut to fit their every whim. The record, fittingly titled For the First Time is hard to describe. It's rock music that’s eclectic and berzerk, as meditative and sparse, yet urgent as they see fit. Their sound owes influence to the math rock of Slint, Black Midi and Squid, yet features inexplicable, hypnotic jazz refrains and contradictory, humorous, self-aware lyrics.

Each track here is transformative, perhaps thanks to all the different people involved in the creative process. Science Fair sees the band’s vocalist Isaac Wood reflect on meeting a fling at a school event and finding his strange attraction to her growing unhealthily stalkerish as he shadows her into Cirque du Soleil, of all places. Unsettling strings and saxophone build in a Hitchcockian fashion, as Wood shrieks in fright, perhaps in a bid to draw attention away from his own behaviour, at the “Black Country out there.” At six-and-a-half-minutes, it’s one of the shorter tracks on the record. If the menacing howls of instrumentation begin to make you feel claustrophobic, then it’s working.

The band’s first two singles, Sunglasses and Athens, France appear on the record, reworked and refreshed. In Sunglasses, Wood sings “I am invincible in these sunglasses / I am looking at you and you cannot tell, I am more than the sum of my parts”, as he slowly removes his rose-coloured glasses during the track, he resolves that he is more than adequate. Athens, France is perhaps the most inspired by Slint, as the band’s hallucinatory momentum turns references of matcha shots, UE Booms, and Phoebe Bridgers from everyday commodities, into twisted and ruinous passages of modern folklore.

Black Country, New Road’s fascination with destructive modernity comes to a head on Opus. This krautrock inspired closing track captures Wood’s thoughts on the industrial revolution and the ‘Black Country’ it made of England as he tries to find his place in the world, before ending the record with an instrumental jam as powerful as that which opened the album.

In spirit For The First Time feels less like a cohesive album, and more of an improvised glance into the seven perspectives that form Black Country, New Road and capture the spirit of a young generation in the UK. It’s their world and in its six, chilling parts, their debut feels like stealing a look at confessional diaries filled with names and codes you don’t understand. The music brings everyone together however, imparting the kind of common purpose you’d find in the thrilling atmosphere of a live gig. When you tap into that energy, how can you complain?

- Sean Tayler.
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