I Can Light So Many Things on Fire
Black Country, New Road, "post-Brexit" music, and other thoughts
The band Black Country, New Road is over. Well, not exactly. Their lead singer (and primary song writer) has decided to leave the band mere days before their sophomore album comes out. Reporting and other ephemera I’ve read about the announcement cites mental health being the major reason Isaac Wood called it quits. Their first album For the First Time was one of my favorite albums of 2021 and it makes me very sad to see them change.
I first heard of the band while drunk in my friend’s newly bought house. What struck me about Black Country, New Road was how propulsive they sounded. Their compositions had hectic drums and effective bass-lines often syncopated or cut out then reintroduced after four bars of keyboards, horns, or strings. Critics commented on their lyrical skill: “like Nick Cave if he read Twitter instead of the Bible” went the Pitchfork review. Wood’s speak-singing has such a whimpering anxiety, one overwhelmed not with rage but with knowledge. He knew everything at once, and everything could be known, still needed to be known and hung in the balance. There is so little time in his voice. Time to learn, to make mistakes or be found wrong. Everything is “references, references, references” as he moans on “Science Fair,” and he’s “so ignorant now with all that [he’s] learned” on “Sunglasses.”
His operatic dread finds its most incisive use on “Athens, France” the first song on the album with lyrics. It opens with a simple rock drum backing and a doom-laden guitar riff that circles the drain of Wood’s rapid lyrics:
“She flies to Paris, France, I come down into her childhood bed
And write the words I'll one day wish that I had never said
Now all that I became must die before the forum thread
The cursed vultures feed and spread the seeded daily bread”
There is a single breath while the guitar and drums keep up the pace and he sighs, “and I guess I found out/what it’s like to be dead.”
To me, they are the most inventive of the “post-Brexit” British post-punk bands, though Dry Cleaning makes me feel the coolest, and black midi are probably the Best One. But, Black Country, New Road has style, bombast, exuberance. Their songs offer much more compositionally than normal pop-fare essentially because they give themselves space beyond three to four-minute texts. “Sunglasses” is almost ten minutes long while the shortest (and weakest) song, “Track X,” is just about five minutes.
Wood’s lyrics bolster the deeply gothic instrumentals with a deft, knowing seriousness. The lyrics’ severity contains the immediate counter-balance one creates in an online personality (Nick Cave on Twitter indeed). On “Science Fair,” “today, I hide away! But tomorrow, I take the reins” he screams, “still living with my mother,” he whispers in the next line.
The songs are often juvenile things, long and unwieldy. They’re overreaching at times. Tracks should be cut in some places or tidied up a bit in others. But they’re brilliant, loose and baggy monsters—why does the singer ask that his subject on “Sunglasses,” to “leave Kanye out of it” over and over? I don’t know! But I like it. I’m also a bit of a sucker for a horn section.
In “Science Fair,” after the guitar distortion breaks down and the strings go circular and manic into a deeper faster keyboard and bass-line, Wood’s narrator smells “children crying” and becomes one among “crowded stans.” He has “sticky hands” like a child would after eating candy—the gothic Wood collapses into childhood, youthfulness in his “best white shirt.” The song ends with a loud chaotic horn section and almost classic-like drum and guitar moment.
Mental health issues are often elucidated and explained in the songs but to what extent “I’m more than adequate/leave my daddy’s job out of this” is Wood’s autofiction (bleh) or poetic creation is a boring, tired debate. Does it sound nice? Does it have style? Is the composition attempting transcendence, or as black midi has suggested, does the art ascend forth somewhere?
In the US, these bands (Dry Cleaning, black midi, Squid, Black Country, New Road etc.) have been discussed in a temporal register (post-Brexit) as opposed to an aesthetic one. In the Guardian, their sprechgesang, literally “spoken singing,” was connected to John Lydon, Mark E. Smith, and even Scott Walker, for me a much more preferable way to evaluate art rather than worry about the political zeitgeist. The temporal post-Brexit offers so much for evaluating depending on one’s understanding of what Brexit was. If it is as Matthew Perpetua, the coiner of post-Brexit rock, suggests a thing of “shame, disappointment and pessimism about Britain's future,” or if it is as Rachel Cusk’s narrator in Kudos argues “the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain” then one’s evaluation of the content and form of the music changes.
The writer in NPR Music overstates his case for coining these bands “post-Brexit” as I think his assumption, wrongly, is that because these musicians are artists of some kind they hold simply liberal values and thus feel brand new shame about Brexit and Britian’s future—as if this wasn’t something British musicians, nevertheless post-punk musicians haven’t been concerned with since the first Joy Division album. The music, in Perpetua’s terms, isn’t something to be wondered at and enjoyed and under evaluation may contain something but political, but in fact the music is politics. He is correct that the music springs from the political context but to suggest that albums released in 2021 are reacting exclusively to news from 2016-2020 is not only poor criticism, it suggests an inability to see beyond one’s immediate situation, the immediate overflow of knowledge and stimuli, as if 2016 were year 0 for artistic creation on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is further anti-intellectual to me to think artists didn’t work out some of the feelings contained in work released in 2021 in 2012, 2008, the day before the album release etc. These things are built up and contextual. It is lazy to make inspiration an equation.
I feel for Isaac Wood. At 22, he is thrust into the music spotlight with a huge UK and US tour and a new album. All the rumblings I’ve seen and my own personal feelings about their new tracks are that this new album (if it ever comes out) won’t be as good as their first. They’ve traded youthful rage and sarcastic knowledge for a saccharine love on “Concorde” and “Snow Globes.” Wood’s voice on those songs has less tremble and more texture, which sounds bland, like a tossed away Arcade Fire track from 2004. I sincerely wish him the best and hope that he either returns to the band in some capacity (like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys) or becomes more than Scott Walker.
· The Drift has a new issue out which is exciting because I am an admirer of their work over there. I plan on discussing the essay “Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot” in a future newsletter. Check out the rest of their stuff which is high quality.
· I recently finished Mark Haber’s Reinhardt’s Garden in anticipation of his new book out this year which tells the story of Jacov Reinhardt’s quest for the essence of melancholy. Formally, the story is one paragraph which made me think of Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newsburyport and some other examples of sustained physical text which I may consider in a future newsletter. I recommend both books if you haven’t read them
· The brilliant Adolph Reed, Jr. was profiled in The New Yorker and while I found the writing of the profile a bit too mushy in some key aspects (specifically to coddle the same New Yorker readers who were sold and presumably fawned over Robin DiAngelo in 2020), Reed is a really important thinker who deserves more attention and discussion