Ants from Up There — Black Country, New Road (Review)
If there’s any problem with Joel Cohen’s version of Macbeth, it’s convincing the audience that Denzel Washington can’t wear royal robes. One of the Scottish play’s most enduring motifs is Macbeth being unable to fit in the clothes of the last king, the crown hanging limply off his head, sleeves folding over his hands like a child in his father’s suit. But, of course, it’s Denzel fucking Washington. If King Kong ain’t got shit on him, Banquo and Duncan don’t either.
But the metaphor persevered for a reason, even beyond Shakespeare’s work, the stage, and politics. Playing dress up is cute enough; indulging delusions of grandeur while gesturing at previous, better versions is embarrassing at best, infuriating at worst.
That brings me to Black Country, New Road.
Born in the ever expanding U.K. post-punk scene, BCNR were part of a vanguard of bands less connected by sound than by an experimental ethos. Unlike the jittery, dancy paranoia of Squid, the sardonic jams of Dry Cleaning or the sheer brutality of black midi, BCNR sprawled across song lengths and genre. With their absurdly long debut single “Sunglasses,” they displayed a hodgepodge of influences, from Jewish folk music, jam band, post-rock and chamber pop. Their debut album For the First Time, lounged across all of it. Outside of opening jam “Instrumental,” For the First Time left me cold. It wasn’t uninviting because of musical complexity, but because they couldn’t pick a direction. They were amorphous, unapproachable.
Their second album, Ants from Up There allows the worst of the debut to crystalize and disposes of all promise accumulated. Certainly the influences are all on display, blindingly so: the cynical mummerings of Lou Reed, the build-burst dynamics of Explosions in the Sky, the guitar and horn interplay of American Football. But BCNR were told of all of these tropes through a game of telephone, the meaning and emotion slowly diluted through each iteration.
And tropes is the best way to explain it. Ants from Up There is a goddamn TV Tropes page for “meaningful album.” BCNR have garnered and encouraged comparisons to Arcade Fire, but at least the Canadians had a back catalog and hooks to lean on before they unravel into pretension.
Now departed lead singer Isaac Wood is both the center and producer of much of the album’s troubles. His voice warbles between a deadpan, Richard Hawley croak (without any underlying gravitas) and a cracking quaver. When Wood’s voice breaks on octave jumps, it feels pre-planned, like the broken note is meant to signify “this is an important moment” rather than it happening naturally. That’s further embedded by Wood’s unfocused storytelling. He can’t choose between stream of consciousness or an actual cohesive plot line. Random bits of scenery float by, New York state lines, jet planes, a lightsaber, all incoherently ramble along. And when Wood does have a cogent thought, it seems to manifest in cringy Gen-Z self hate. “No one had wi-fi inside your apartment so we knelt at your alter,” he mumbles. I didn’t think, in the year of our lord 2022, I’d hear a “what if we could just all get off our phones maaaaaaan” statement.
Wood, of course, is just the masthead of what’s wrong with Ants from Up There. The wood is rotted through to the core. BCNR can never have a straight ahead hook, instead they meander to unsatisfactory, non-conclusions. “Chaos Space Marine” and “Concorde” can’t get out of their own way, with the album’s scant hooks and catchy melodies discarded quickly to indulge further noodling. “Concorde,” particularly, is a limp waltz, a milquetoast pastiche of Midwest emo, a genre that’s already pretty wonderbread at its worst. “Good Will Hunting” squanders its good will by closing with a squall of flatulent horns and “Haldern” ends with an ear piercing string arrangement that sounds like the bow resin was replaced with lead. Even the short, Philip Glass inspired “Intro,” eventually descends into needless atonal bubbling, despite initially holding one of the album’s few truly pretty passages.
And that’s Ants from Up There at its best, good ideas frittered away with needless indulgence and excess. At its worst, it actively points out how trope laden these genres have become. The slow, go-nowhere strums of “Snow Globes”? Well that’s how an IMPORTANT song starts. Never mind that the 9-minute long jam is utterly devoid of new ideas. On the entirely too long closer “Basketball Shoes,” a climax erupts mid song and disappears just as quickly, shrugging its shoulders at its placement, like a brief transmission from a more interesting song that actually built up and deserved a climax. “The Place Where He Placed the Blade’’ with its chorus line piano chords and interjections of sunshiny horns sounds like math-rock kids attempting to write a Broadway musical, the most annoying tendencies of both camps on full display. Interlude “Mark’s Theme” is white noise, an ambient track in the midst of wide-scoped songs that adds nothing. It’s there because it’s the sort of tune that would be placed between epics–-if BCNR had the ability to write them.
BCNR seem to pick their dynamic swings by throwing darts at a board, unbothered by emotional heft or song structure. It could be seen as a sort of statement of anarchism against traditional songwriting, but that seems a stretch for an album that never gets above 90 beats per minute and lacks an ounce of humor.
Ants from Up There is overwrought, over long and grasping at delusions of grandeur. It is an unforgivably long album with many songs longer than 7 minutes, all of them empty slogs. They piddle their way to ambivalent endings, like the band is afraid of making any definite statement. That would require them to throw off their tropes and actually bare their hearts and minds. Wood’s lyrical technique appears to be to ramble until he accidentally finds a point. “He doesn’t look anything like Jesus,” was better off in a Killers song because The Killers knew the Springsteen pastiche they made needed a Jesus reference to make it wonderfully overblown. BCNR sees Jesus as a shortcut to importance, rather than tying it to a story. With Wood’s aimless mewl and lack of narrative wit, there are no emotional stakes. The image of a “Concorde” plane is brought up in three songs, but it’s just an image. A still picture. Maybe it’s a signifier of change, but it’s divorced from any narrative grounding. Much like how Space Jam 2 said “look there is a reference, that is storytelling” BCNR references emotions instead of feeling them.
Finally there’s “Snow Globes,” a torpid, slog of a song that sums up everything wrong with Ants from Up There. It takes the worst turns from the jam band mentality, blowing up a discordant drum solo into a wall of sound that’s big in an obnoxious, not thunderous way. Perhaps it’s for the best, as it masks Wood’s inconsistent wail about how “snowglobes don’t shake on their own.”
Over on Rateyourmusic, one fan described that lyric as “one of the most devastating lines i’ve ever heard and i can’t really place why. i don’t even think i can articulate what it means.” That commenter inadvertently reveals the game of Ants from Up There. It sounds devastating, it reaches for meaning, grasps for emotion, but isn’t doesn’t reach anything. It is a facsimile. “Snowglobes don’t shake on their own”doesn’t mean anything. It, and BCNR as a whole, waves vaguely at themes of change, letting the listener do the emotional lifting to make it meaningful. It is a cheap, easy way to stimulate emotions, replicating facades of climaxes and tricks used by infinitely more skilled and thoughtful artists.
“I just woke up and you already don’t care that I tried my best,” moans Wood. If this is your best bud, I got some bad news. The clothes of better bands don’t just fit loosely on you: you are swallowed whole by them.
