The best new albums this week

Albums your world should revolve around this week

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Black Country, New Road – Ants From Up There (Ninja Tune) 

Almost precisely one year ago today, the genre-bending London based seven-piece Black Country, New Road dropped their much anticipated debut album. ‘For The First Time’ was a staggering, carefully crafted achievement that gave longtime followers the finalised studio versions of material they’d already become abundantly familiar with, while its chaotic blend of post-rock, math-rock, emo and even klezmer, peaked the intrigue of music lovers from differing walks of life.

The dynamic instrumentation, eclectic composition, and melancholic sense of grandeur packed into a concise 6-track, 40-minute runtime all contributed to the record winding up on several end of year lists. Then came the touring.

For context: ‘For The First Time’ was originally set for a 2020 release, but was understandably pushed back during a very unprecedented time for new acts. By the time the album was pressed, published and consumed, the group were already hard at work on the follow-up. In fact, every date of the promotional tour for their debut, featured more unknown material than it did cuts from said record.

Therefore, it wasn’t much of a surprise when the band unveiled plans to drop their second album, ‘Ants From Up There’ right on the heels of its predecessor with a tentative February 2022 release date.

Like their debut, this new project features material almost as old as the group themselves; tracks looking for a home even longer than those on FTFT. Longtime fans and even recent concert attendees will be elated to find that the studio renditions of well known cuts such as the ambient folk swell of ‘Bread Song’ go beyond their initial live incarnations, with layers of delicate nuance imbued into every gentle note.

The final two tracks are also longstanding fan favourites; the 9-minute post-folk ode ‘Snow Globes’ mutates and cascades with frantic, off-kilter drum fills, building a sense of sonic warring with the heartfelt refrain from frontman Isaac Wood. It’s arguably the most virtuosic performance on record from drummer Charlie Wayne, whose patience, restraint and understanding of minimalism are briefly thrown aside to showcase what untethered hands can conjure.

Doubling down further on the epic sense of scale, and easily the most vital piece of fan service for day one listeners, is the near quarter of an hour closing track, ‘Basketball Shoes’; an emotive slowcore post-rock opus initially written and performed in their early Windmill days with bizarre lyrics alluding to wet dreams involving Charli XCX. The track has since been revised, and redrafted into a genuinely challenging catalogue of emotional complexity, detailing the disconnect of two lovers in tumultuous, heart-rendering specificity. The tortured final wails from Wood, sitting atop the type of mammoth crescendo that’d made Godspeed You! Black Emperor blush, can only be described in so many varying manners and phrases, but nothing can honestly equate to experiencing it in full.

There’s no denying the conscious departure from their slightly more jagged edged earlier work, with the Slint tribute act mathisms traded for a far softer, delicate emo-folk take on Funeral era Arcade Fire. 

‘Good Will Hunting’ recalls Bright Eyes at their most lush, while opener ‘Chaos Space Marine’ swoons and jolts like an indie band quantum leaped into the role of country vaudeville act at the community theatre. 

While there’s still a few pop culture quips here and there, such as “She had Billie Eilish style”, it’s difficult not to ignore the significantly darker, defeated lyricism that plagues the runtime. ‘Haldern’ is easily the most haunting, unsettling and hypnotic track the collective have crafted to date, with everything from the anxious string repetitions to the final cryptic verses alluding to death, grief and loss in sincere yet sinister fashion. 

Unfortunately, Wood’s departure from the collective just earlier this week will naturally loom over this project and, especially, it’s lyrics and themes for some time to come. It’s a very bittersweet occurrence to coincide with such an immense work, as for now all promotional tour dates have been cancelled, while the remaining six members have since assured fans that this isn’t the end of the (new) road. 

If ‘Ants From Up There’ serves as sophomore swan song to this first iteration of Black Country, or we simply and sadly never hear from them again, there’s atleast comfort and solace to be found in their unmatched passion, vision and romanticism. Not merely a 180 from their debut, but a reimagining, reanalysis and rebirth all at once.

ZB

Cate Le Bon – Pompeii (Mexican Summer)

It is, as Meghan Trainor once pointed out, all about the bass. Well not all, but we’ll get to that in minute.

‘Pompeii’ is Le Bon’s sixth album, her first since 2019’s Mercury-nominated ‘Reward’. You’re one step ahead of me here, right? It is, indeed, the lockdown album. After recording ‘Reward’ in Cumbrian seclusion and falling for the biting cold of Iceland while producing John Grant’s brilliant ‘Boy From Michigan’, her plans for another sojourn, to record in Scandinavia or maybe South America, were scuppered by the pandemic.

Unable to even head home to LA when the US closed their borders, along with long-time collaborator Samur Khouja, Le Bon headed home-home. The tug of family saw her renting a house in Cardiff and the pair set to work, uninterrupted in splendid isolation. So while Wales might not be the preferred inspirational backdrop, as the title suggests, the themes here are apocalyptic – a global lurgy meets environmental meltdown  

Playing everything expect drums (supplied remotely by old pal Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa) and sax (from Sweet Baboo’s Stephen Black and Younghusband’s Euan Hinshelwood), the bass is very much front and centre.

The rolling lines are inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop and Le Bon works the instrument like Japan’s Mick Karn or Jah Wobble (especially on the louche lines of ‘French Boys’). And yet, in a very swift volte face, Meghan wasn’t totally right. ‘Pompeii’ isn’t <i>all<i> about the bass.

The songwriting is premium rate. It’s the kind of record a Sunday morning would be made all the richer for. The infectious earworm melody of ‘Harbour’ is so comfortable in its own skin it’s like an old friend even on the first listen, while the plinky-plonk relaxed groove of ‘Running Away’ invokes thoughts of the gentle thrill of This Mortal Coil.

‘Pompeii’ very much comes from the school of less is more. Nothing outstays its welcome, nothing is over-egged. To quote our Meghan again, all the right junk in all the right places. Except this is no junk. Le Bon’s journey since the skewed psyche-folk of her 2009 debut ‘Me Oh My’ has seen her work grow richer with each release. ‘Pompeii’ is a real Goldilocks moment. Just right.

NM

Billy Talent – Crisis Of Faith (Spinefarm) 

Canadian post-hardcore stalwarts, Billy Talent, have built their career upon a subtle combination of the energetic fury of punk imbued with a nuanced understanding of melody.

One might argue that the band rarely stray beyond their comfort zone, but when a formula works, it can be difficult for an artist to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

2018’s ‘Afraid of Heights’ proved an exercise in dynamism; exploring the somewhat self-imposed confines of their sound, while ‘Crisis of Faith’ takes the lessons of that experiment, and runs a marathon with them.

Cuts like the tense, brief minute-and-a-half anthemic thump of ‘Judged’, highlight a much more direct, aggro side to the group, with a politically charged hardcore belter, taking all of the poignant and necessary shots it requires to get its message across.

While some may be deterred from frontman Ben Kowalewicz’s to the point lyricism, which has taken on even more of a weathered dispondence over the past two decades, you’d be going out of your way to ignore the sheer nerd-punk crossover of lead single, ‘End of Me’, which sports an A1 feature from Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. The jangly, college-rock riffage, the trade off vocals, and a cynical tale utilising both lyricist’s penchant for the morose, critical and deadpan, make for one of the finest pop songs of the Billy Talent cannon to date. 

Where ‘Crisis of Faith’ may not appeal, or even express interest in the non-converted, those who are well versed in the Billy Talent trappings are sure to find lots to love, and rekindle peak interest.

ZB

Dan Nicholls – Mattering & Meaning (We Jazz)

The piano is an instrument weighted with meaning, carrying centuries of tradition in its cumbersome form. But it’s also redolent with intimacy and nostalgia, evoking small moments in one’s life, whether from literal memories or perhaps supplanted through the power of celluloid and imagined experience. Of course, its fundamental tone has a major part to play – there’s a reason that it’s remained such a central instrument in western music, but perhaps even more powerful in the modern age is when someone manipulates this albatross of musical convention in an inventive way.

Dan Nicholls has plenty of history in piano from a traditional standpoint, having trained at Birmingham Conservatoire amongst others, but now he resides in the open-ended realm of experimentation, as comfortable weaving dub techno or dealing in jagged improv as he is playing a sonata. On this album for Finnish label We Jazz, he takes a slanted approach to the piano and bends it to his considerable processing ideas.

Captured within his environment on a phone mic, the piano gets reduced in stature in one way, but emboldened in another. It bends and folds, and illustrious forms rise up to greet it. Murmuring shadow tones slither beneath it. The hiss of white noise creeps in and out of earshot. Through it all, Nicholls keeps the piano in the mix even as he pushes the tone without compromise. In the end, it’s the tone that holds everything together so beautifully, rendering this captivating and delicately executed album with that sense of fractured nostalgia the piano can be so adept at inspiring.

OW

Fair To Midland – Fables From A Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times Is True (Music On Vinyl)

Every once in a while, an artist slips through the cracks, or is simply lost to the annals of time. So, it’s comforting when a criminally underrated masterwork like ‘Fables From A Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times Is True’ receives the Music On Vinyl anniversary reissue treatment.

A quick recap – Fair To Midland were a, sadly, too short-lived alternative metal band from Texas, whose seminal third effort peaked the interest of System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian, eventually agreeing to publish the album through his Serjical Strike label imprint back in 2007.

An outlier at the time of its release, the project has become a cult classic and indirect influence on so much of today’s modern progressive rock and art metal acts. The unmatched animated vocal prowess of frontman Darroh Sudderth, combined with his knack for surrealist, absurdist lyricism as well the dynamic fusing of folk-inflected prog fusion with metallic abandon, made for lightning in a bottle chemistry. 

Mammoth riffs intertwine with fantastical and hypnotic keys throughout cuts like the devastating opener, ‘Dance of the Manatee’, while it’s the more serene and heartfelt moments like the anthemic ‘Vice/Versa’, or the melancholic ode to Sudderth’s divorced parents on highlight, ‘The Wife, The Kids & The White Picket Fence’, that make ‘Fables…’ a forgotten gem deserving of a the highest praise. It’s also a day to rejoice when the album is available on wax again for the first time in years (and not for extortionate resale prices).  

ZB

Holy Other – Lieve (Holy Other)

Word of a new Holy Other (David Ainley) album gets out, and we’re all over it. It’s been nearly a decade of silence from the hooded figure that brought us Know Where – get it? – but from the consistent, pulsing mood and tone of Ainley’s output, we had no worries that it’d be as great as it is. 

Take an auditory peek through ‘Lieve’, and the word ‘throbbing’ springs to mind. This music throbs: whether that be by way of the inhale-exhale style breaths peppered over its beats (‘Dirt Under Your Nails’); its sudden, stupendous sidechains (‘Shudder’); or its granular, random-generated sound effects and delays (‘Bough Down’). And while still taking cues from his come-up contemporaries like Lorn, Balam Acab, Clams Casino and Shlohmo, this guy still brings something new to the table that we’re not convinced he could have brought back in 2013. The hilariously-named ‘Heartrendering’ opens with vocaloid harmonies and displaced, free-rhythmic drums – the latter of which is a motif we hear throughout ‘Lieve’ but not so much on ‘Held’, which was more rooted in dance music and downtempo. 

Ainsley also indulges in odder, lighter and more adventurous sound play. Compared to the gushing overwhelm of past bits like ‘Tense Past’ or ‘Nothing Here’, ‘Groundless’ is odder, lighter and more curious. And on ambient near-closers ‘Shudder’ and ‘Whatever You Are You’re Not Mine’, we get an intense, never-before-seen look at Holy Other’s universe at rest, with its comparatively breathable sound design revealing metallic squeaks and well-wrought crunches between the beats.

Perhaps all this dazzling newness stems from the artist’s near-decade meditation on a sound that might as well been thought dead. Of course, we were proven wrong. That’s not to mention his extended artist residency at Bidston Observatory in the Wirral, England, where he recorded and resampled much of the material that would become the album’s bedrock. Using the basement and the geometrically perfect wooden domes found there, we imagine Holy Other staring up at the sky, mesmerised by the constellations that scatter and twinkle imperfectly. Just like the (un)holy rhythms scattered about his new music. 

JIJ

Benoit B – Kismet (Natural Selections)

Benoit B first came onto my radar via an EP on Wisdom Teeth back in 2018. It was a perfect release for Facta and K-Lone’s label, cast in shimmering digitalia, sliding across tempos and creating a beauteous soundworld in the process. It’s the kind of four-track EP with the attitude of an album, and so we come to this LP from the French producer for Nummer’s Natural Selections. Kismet is largely made of miniatures which build on B’s pronounced style, with ample room to explore a range of sounds from ambient delicacy to off-kilter beatdowns.

The likes of ‘Punkster’ could absolutely work on a dancefloor, albeit a more fluid and free-range one. You can hear whispers of Wally Badarou in the fluttering melodies and tumbling drums, coming on like 21st Century Compass Point and sounding strong with it. The tension between retro-tinted musical motifs and modernist gleam is one of the real charms on Kismet, as 80s FM synthesis achieves a new level of polish which feels almost hyperreal on a more atmospheric piece like ‘The Odyssey’. A fine exercise in world-building, it’s the kind of track which you could happily reside in for days, such is the wonderment B works into his compositions. By focusing on shorter expressions he’s also able to take us further afield, and you come through the album feeling like you visited some truly fantastic places, imagined though they may be.

OW

This week’s reviewers: Zach Buggy, Neil Mason, Jude Iago James, Oli Warwick.