"Ants From Up There" : Black Country, New Road's second album

If anyone mistook this London-via- Cambridge collective’s debut album, For The First Time (2021), for a fluke, this rapid-delivery second album should set them straight. After the mounting plaudits and Mercury Music Prize nomination, Black Country, New Road execute a significant upgrade here.

Recorded in a no-nonsense three weeks with Lexington sound engineer/producer Sergio Maschetzko, the result pays part-testimony to the band's impressive live momentum. Some of the songs have cooked in their set for a while, though Black Country... are not a band to lean on established foundations. Ants is an emphatic leap forward, harnessing the seven-piece’s punk-virtuoso flair for sonic disruption to catchier, more controlled songs than before.

Intro is indicative, its Sufjan Stevens-ish vibrancy getting the overture job done at a swift pace. Eager-beaver spirit established, Black Country... tear fast into Chaos Space Marine, a hit of jazzy chamber-pop spread out across dancing violins, clamorous pianos and super-charged saxophones with a notable surprise upfront: Isaac Wood’s vocals. Where previous Road-songs emphasized the spoken word, Wood visits the middle ground between Neil Hannon and Win Butler or David Byrne here, targeting the edge of his range with maniacal vim and an appealing crack in his voice.

Those cracked vocals suit Black Country...’s newfound streak of tenderness nicely. Startingas a whisper-soft lament before proceeding towards joyous eruptions of noise, Concorde mixes their extremities astutely. Crescendo fatigue may be a small issue, but it’s offset by the next track. A beatific heartbreaker, Bread Song marries Steve Reich’s influence to a modern love song couched in quotidian details (breadcrumbs, WiFi, mobile-phone signals), all set to a warm backdrop of post-folk arpeggios.

Throughout, Black Country...'s reserves of compositional interest run deep. Haldem is an improvised chamber-prog reverie. The Place Where He Inserted The Blade maps out a skewed exercise in lounge-blues catharsis, inspired by Bob Dylan.

Wood’s lyrics rise to the occasion, navigating tales of escapism (planes and spaceships feature) and longing with lateral kinks that snag. An insistent, Mogwai-esque tread underpins a tale of friendship and “funny-looking” bedroom shrines on Snow Globes. Its partner-piece, closer Basketball Shoes, extends similar themes into an intimate epic of wet dreams and parasocial fixation over an intense, slow-build arrangement: perhaps the first time post-rock and Charli XCX have met in song. Godspeed you, then, Black Country, New Road: wherever their Concordes and starships fly next, this fully imagined second album showcases an adventurous band at full tilt.