A year following the release of For the First Time, now one of the great rock alchemies of 2021 doubles down without taking the time to let its test tubes cool, ready on the contrary to prolong the boil until the formulas are exhausted. Reminder of the facts: Black Country, New Road, these are seven young English people from Cambridge (four boys and three girls), kind of vegan children of Captain Beefheart fed on both free-jazz and post-rock, klezmer music and the lyrical and distinguished pop of which they reveal a little more here the heady aromas. On the single released as a scout for this second album, Chaos Space Marine, it looks like a jokari game between Neil Hannon (Divine Comedy, on the verses) and Jarvis Cocker (Pulp, on the choruses), with the Arcade Fire brass band for spectators. A moment of grace, before attacking the steeper cliffs of tracks that stretch in length without ever pulling the line, and each measure of which contains more invention and intensity than the entire discography of Coldplay.
Where the first gallop, sometimes out of breath, seemed to be intoxicated by wanting too much to embrace genres, here the rhythm is more restrained, the magnetic song of Isaac Wood better posed, even if thanks to a generic title a not very enigmatic (“Ants seen from up there”), it teems with studious impatience to mark territories not yet conquered. From the beautiful boiling that surrounds this heterogeneous scene (Squid, Back Midi or their American cousins Geese), we remember that it no longer has any social, clan roots – that old antiphon of English rock –, that it has sets the darons’ discotheque on fire, and that it is above all important for it to communicate sensations, dizziness, fears or ecstasies, outside the retro enclosures but without post-modern show off for all that. These are millennials without tics and far from TikTok who knit pieces of cosmic dimensions (more than 12 minutes for their only finale, Basketball Shoes) without thinking of themselves as pontificating saviors of humanity, art and the planet. Pure music, basically, which makes burial and a certain brooding beauty a style in itself. Which is nothing.