ANTS FROM UP THERE

Revisiting Black Country New Roads and their devastating second album

By Tom Knight 

Reflecting on the release of Spirit of Eden, Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis said that “the trend is far too much towards singles, and far too much towards the sort of technicality of music, rather than the actual spirit.” Exactly what this ‘spirit’ is remains unclear, but it hints at the different musical reality Talk Talk had set their sights on. Their latter albums took the components of music – rhythm, harmony, tempo, tone – and created something that sounded completely different. It was music freed from the usual rules: chorus and verse melded together, melodies interrupted and distorted themselves, songs stretched past the 6-minute mark. Unlike the folkloric bands that ‘changed the way music sounds forever’, Talk Talk created a sound that would never be made again.

Something similar could be said about Ants from Up There – Black Country, New Road’s shimmering second album. Despite sometimes being lumped in with the modern ‘post-punk’ wave, this is a band doing entirely their own thing, and with this album, they claimed a new piece of musical terrain. Ants from Up There takes the dimensions of classical music, infuses it with jazz, mixes in dashes of klezmer and chamber, and renders it into rock. Like Spirit of Eden, it is music operating at a different scale and by different rules.

The album’s uniqueness is underlined by the fact the band no longer exists. Lead singer Isaac Woods left the group on the eve of the album’s release, and some have interpreted its songs as an explanation for why he had to go. Woods’ lyrics oscillate between the simple and oblique, delicate and goofy, sincere and whimsical. They are delivered in a frenetic, quavering voice that simultaneously underlines and debases the words’ meaning. We’ve heard similar angry-ironic squawks from the likes of Squid and Black Midi, but there is something genuinely dysregulated and vulnerable about Woods that sets him apart. Lines like “Isaac must suffer so Concorde can fly” reveal the tension that he feels will only be resolved by his absence.

Musically, the album strikes a balance between technical perfection and intuitive intensity. Some bandmembers are classically trained, others are self-styled “bedroom rockstars”. All of them are in their early twenties. They combine to make songs that move and breathe organically, with compositions that follow a deep natural logic rather than reheating pop convention. In Good Will Hunting, instruments shift in kaleidoscopic patterns, forming temporary harmony with each other before spinning off into new and unexpected patterns. In Snow Globes, the band set out to record a drum track for a different song, purposefully drawing on the discordance to drag the other instruments into interesting configurations.

Leaps in technology are often responsible for progress in music, but Ants From Up There achieves its innovation organically. The music is defined by the natural sounds of drums, guitar, piano, bass, violin and saxophone. You will find a harpsichord and glockenspiel in the sleeve notes, but no synthesiser or drum machine. Even the production is raw: the band snubbed a virtuoso producer and asked Sergio Maschetzko, their live sound engineer, to record the album instead. Inspired by the likes of Al Schmitt, they entrusted their sound to carefully positioned ambient mics, rather than relying on the usual EQ-processing or modular construction. The resulting open and warm texture of live instrumentation is reminiscent of Neil Young’s On the Beach.

And with this directness comes unparalleled emotion. There is no climax to the album; there is not even a climax in each song. Instead, the music exists in a constant state of emotional turbulence, swirling with portent and occasionally breaking into catharsis. Music and lyric collide in unholy combinations that enrich and stir and provoke. The listener becomes the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog – submerged in the scale, fear and complexity of it all.

If this is essentially a farewell album, then it ends with a suitably Viking funeral. Basketball Shoes is no crescendo, but a collapse. It starts with a ghost procession of notes that builds as instruments layer and interlock. Then the violin and saxophone stray from the guitar, wrapping themselves around like toxic vines, testing the song’s structural integrity. The melody buckles under its own weight, and the instruments reorganise themselves around the motifs that have weaved through the album. Woods tentatively thanks the audience for “your generous loan to me” but also notes its “crippling interest”.

And then, with the drop of a chord, the band sets it all to flames. An inferno rips through song with rolling cymbals, writhing guitar, convulsive violins and gail-force singing. The motifs of the album are obliterated in the noise. Nothing survives this storm. The whole project disappears in its final act. Woods has left.  A whole musical landscape created and destroyed in 58 minutes.