Black Country, New Road
Ants From Up There

The second album is always a gamble. You have a whole (young) life to conceive the debut and a few months, sometimes just over a year if you're lucky, to conceive its follow-up, often disappointing or carbon-copied from the acclaimed revelation.

The first track starts: disorientation, moments of uncertainty and… you wonder if you've got the wrong band, year, label. Okay, there's always a bit of Steve Reich in Black Country, New Road (the American minimalists are always somehow related to art-rock), but who expected such a rich orchestration with electric guitar in the background? A true instrumental prélude from a rock opera without the excessive flourish that the genre generally suggests and has almost always dangerously inflicted on us.

Pure wonder of writing, execution, and arrangement.

And we're only at the introduction (Intro is paradigmatically the title) of Ants From Up There, the highly anticipated second chapter of the Cambridge combo that has almost unanimously ignited the specialized press in the last couple of years.

Saying "opera" often means melodrama, and it's a deconstructed melodrama that seems to take the stage at first listen, already widely anticipated off-screen by the unexpected and almost brutal defection, just days before the album's release, of singer and guitarist Isaac Wood, whose deep and lyrically tragic voice is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the immediate recognizability and success of the group.

There's no time to be too astonished, the wonder continues with the second track, and the stylistic signature of the album is now clear: sketches, overlaps, inserts of different textures and styles coalesce into an extraordinarily cohesive whole.

If in the debut For the First Time the jazz/new-no wave forays of saxophonist Lewis Ewans, as well as the expressionist colorations of Georgia Ellery's violin, were ambitious and nervous overlays on a bass/guitar/drum weave with a post-rock imprint (Slint, certainly, but also Tortoise and to some extent the math of Battles), in Ants... brass and strings are often protagonists and drivers of the compositional structure in an exciting chase between the most diverse influences.

Even the title of this second track, however obscure, seeks no ambiguity – Chaos Space Marine – yet it is a crystalline chaos, controlled and at the same time overflowing with emotion. The attack of Isaac's voice seems to recall the best Neil Hannon (Divine Comedy) only to explode, backed by the impressive progression of the entire group, in an enthusiastic homage to Arcade Fire's Funeral, often cited as a prototype of artistic success (“The next Arcade Fire – that’s our goal,”). Epic without a doubt, grandiose perhaps, but no one would dream of changing a single note.

A separate note, and pardon the pun, deserve the mature and desolate lyrics of Isaac Wood on the verge of emotional collapse. Without telling a precise and linear story as in a concept album, the now former voice of BCNR ("It’s daunting to be 'the voice' of a band" recalls bassist Tyler Hyde), in the sequence of tracks on Ants... traces the unstoppable parabola of the end of a love, a relationship, probably Isaac's with the show-biz world and the illusory harmony with his lost traveling companions. A physical transfiguration even in Chaos Space Marine – “Darling, will you take my metal hand It's cold”, “So I’m leaving this body and I’m never coming home again”, “I’m becoming a worm now and I'm looking for a place to live.”

A feeling of deterioration and collapse that amplifies in Concorde – “And the doctor said we are unfortunately running out of options to treat, what a funny way to speak” – the third song of the album, where the metaphor of the ancient technological jewel, a chimerical progress reduced to a dusty relic, is cadenced on a sparkling ballad that mixes waltz and folk (superb work by Ewans on horns with Ellery on mandolin) between Bowiesque echoes and spurts of Waterboys and Dexys Midnight Runners.

The initial deceptive exuberance is completely suffocated in the following Bread Crumbs, musically inspired according to Wood by Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians (yes, him again). The track, which at least in its initial guitar arpeggio pays some tribute to Radiohead's In Rainbows (Reckoner, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi) opens up plunging into a poignant melancholy that recalls the early Penguin Cafe Orchestra of the late Simon Jeffes. Fragments of memories of a love, often at a distance, that is about to dissolve – the annoyance felt for the crumbs of toast eaten in bed becomes regret when opposed to the imperfect zoom calls with the hopping wifi – but which is sublimated in an always complex and engaging harmonic construction with its rapid and then restrained accelerations.

We could talk extensively about the other tracks as well but the key to understanding is now defined and each piece offers a new variation of the stratified artistic conception that makes Ants… an absolutely indispensable work. There are countless references, influences, tributes, yet they manage spectacularly to return the kaleidoscopic tumult of the assembled material in a fully personal vision – honor and glory also to the excellent contribution of producer Sergio Maschetzko, strangely ignored in the countless reviews.

Just a mention of the final Basketball Shoes, the only one to initially reprise the slint-like atmospheres that dominated For the First Time: its slow and progressive transformation is emblematic of the new course of BCNR, as if we were witnessing in a few minutes an evolution that happened over several months. Ants... is also the band's definitive appropriation of all its more British (in a broad sense) ancestries when the first album sounded rather like an emanation in the sign of US post-rock on which to trigger a European sensitivity, especially in the singing and the already present instrumental variety.

Orphaned of Woods, the BCNR are now an unknown entity but from the statements it seems a new turning point is being prepared. I am hopeful.