The Daily Spin, January 17
Black Country, New Road | Ants From Up There
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here.
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Album: Ants From Up There (2022)
Artist: Black Country, New Road
Link:
This album was touted everywhere I looked last year, as the highly-anticipated follow up to Black Country, New Road’s 2021 debut For the first time - and yet, I feel it doesn’t match that hype in any real sense of what that word means.
From my perspective, a lot of this album is carried by the potential drama and mystique of the lyrics following lead vocalist Isaac Woods’ departure from the band just four days before the release of Ants From Up There, but in that lies the sword that hangs above the head - it’s really hard to drive hype for an album if so much of it is reliant on knowing the intimate details of the band itself.
When the music is good, it’s excellent. Bread Song stands out as a force on the album, allowing the band the most opportunities to showcase their talents. Despite their lengths of 9 and 12.5 minutes, respectively, the closing tracks do a brilliant job of bringing the album together - but it’s the rest that feels a lot more cluttered than it should throughout.
Rating: 6.2/10
Best Tracks: Bread Song; Snow Globes
Worst Tracks: Concorde