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Black Country, New Road

Started by danwho9, February 11, 2021, 04:07:48 PM

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danwho9

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/black-country-new-road/for-the-first-time/
Definitely recommend giving this a listen if you haven't already, it's been compared a lot to Slint which definitely makes sense but it also fits in to a lot of the artsy post-punk that's been getting well acclaimed the past couple of years (Squid, black midi etc.)

sweeper

They're like, 'what if Slint, but tunes?' I quite liked some of this record.

Shit vocals, though, he should keep his trap shut.

Post-punk needs to die, doesn't it, as a genre? It was once a limitless playing field where everything was in play, and has now come to mean 'sounds like The Fall circa mid-80s', or that kind of grotesque, performative noise that Black Midi do.

Fuck post-punk, fuck punk, and fuck posts.

lankyguy95

Listened to this a couple of times the other day. Musically, I enjoyed it.

Lyrically and vocally, I was nursing hatred.

VelourSpirit

QuoteI open the lid of my Macbook Pro
I watch pop music videos on YouTube
By Kanye West and Miley Cyrus
I don't have to search
Because the suggestions bar guides me
The suggestions bar knows me better than ever before
And it's almost like love
Like the feeling of intense belonging
When a barmaid addresses you by name
And you know in some way you have transcended
fucking SHUT UP

scarecrow

They were profiled by the Guardian last week. I listened to see if they were as dreadful as their name suggests. I loved the first song and was quite excited about them, and even messaged a couple of friends suggesting they check it out. Then I listened to some of their other tracks and realised that they are, in fact, total shit.

Stoneage Dinosaurs

Saw them a couple of years back in Cambridge when they were called Nervous Conditions, before their lead singer got #metoo'd and thought they were kind of alright. Heard one of their songs (Sunglasses) on spotify discover and thought it was a pretty interesting slab of post punky coolness but didn't know it was the same lot of guys. That quoted lyrical bit two posts above is pretty bad though and makes me not want to bother investigating further

amputeeporn

Quote from: Angrew Lloyg Wegger on February 11, 2021, 06:04:21 PM
Saw them a couple of years back in Cambridge when they were called Nervous Conditions, before their lead singer got #metoo'd and thought they were kind of alright. Heard one of their songs (Sunglasses) on spotify discover and thought it was a pretty interesting slab of post punky coolness but didn't know it was the same lot of guys. That quoted lyrical bit two posts above is pretty bad though and makes me not want to bother investigating further

Obviously any lyric quoted in isolation can look bad - especially when a band or lyricist like this is clearly trying to be out there on the borderline, but imo rather that than more awful songwriting living in a futureless, airless, past where the internet never happened - still singing about babies and rhyming older with colder. Like it or not, the internet should be the modern day metaphor in our lives. At least, occasionally.

sweeper

The way people feel about the internet now is probably how people felt when they started mass producing carpets in 1857, or whenever. It's a utility, and not really all that interesting.

There's probably a short lived historical period of folk ballads celebrating and worrying about the life-changing implications of underlay and carpeted staircases, which nobody sings anymore.

RenegadeScrew

Quote from: amputeeporn on February 11, 2021, 10:47:01 PM
Obviously any lyric quoted in isolation can look bad - especially when a band or lyricist like this is clearly trying to be out there on the borderline, but imo rather that than more awful songwriting living in a futureless, airless, past where the internet never happened - still singing about babies and rhyming older with colder. Like it or not, the internet should be the modern day metaphor in our lives. At least, occasionally.

Verse:
I sat down at my laptop
I started playing In A Silent Way
I have it in FLAC
Then I found out Chick Corea had died
It was on an internet forum primarily about comedy
But it certainly wasn't funny
And neither was Rick Beato on YouTube
So I started watched some Kitboga
But then I got distracted again
Because that's what the internet is like
Technology moves so fast
And yet people react to stuff on YouTube
That they've surely seen before

Chorus:
But nothing really matters
We're just like domain names after all
Whenever the hadron collider stuff clatters
Let me be your subdomain when you fall

Dr Syntax Head

Ticks all my boxes but does nothing for me. I hate when that happens

purlieu

One of them is Karl from Underworld's daughter, which is the only interesting thing I can think to say about them.

peanutbutter

Saw them getting hyped on rateyourmusic a while back and gave them a list, pretty shite. There was another one recently that really set me off on post-punk, Squid, I think?

kittens

i saw them live at a festival, very drunk, didn't really remember it. my girlfriend got us tickets to see them early last year, and i thought it was fantastic. gonna buy this record, hope it's good lads

Janie Jones

BBC Radio 6 Music love them - Mary Ann Hobbs had them in for a session and considers them 'sensational' - and for that reason, I'm oot.

Beagle 2

That's the thing, I'm old now so the only time I hear about hyped new bands is on 6music, but as soon as a band is hyped on 6music, I'm predisposed to detest them.

Got the album on now and it's... hmm yeah pretty good.

Endicott

Bands I've heard hyped on 6 music

Idles - shit obviously

Fontaines DC - good

This is the Kit - good

Pom Poko - good

There've been other shit ones and other good ones, but I don't really understand the blanket condemnation.

danwho9

Quote from: peanutbutter on February 11, 2021, 11:56:53 PM
There was another one recently that really set me off on post-punk, Squid, I think?
Squid are a great bunch of lads, looking forward to their album coming out in May especially to see if it inspires as much hype and online discourse as this record has.

Janie Jones

Quote from: Endicott on February 12, 2021, 10:25:07 AM
Bands I've heard hyped on 6 music

Idles - shit obviously

Fontaines DC - good

This is the Kit - good

Pom Poko - good

There've been other shit ones and other good ones, but I don't really understand the blanket condemnation.

Car Seat Headrest, Catfish and the Bottlemen - absolute fucking gash, STEVE LAMACQ DIE DIE

It's hard to explain my love/hate relationship with R6 Music. As a former indie kid now pushing 60 it's obviously designed by and for the likes of me. My son sometimes makes me a Spotify playlist to vary my diet of Belle and Sebastian and Pigs x 7 and as a result I love Pa Salieu - then he got onto the R6 playlist and my rage and disgust at this was nothing normal.

The Mollusk

Steve Lamacq is a fucking wand. I've developed a really good impression of him which I break out frequently to wind up my girlfriend. She says it's eerily accurate.

Will be back soon to post about this album, gave it a listen this morning and wasn't massively impressed.

Endicott

LAMACQ is an exception of course, I've no idea how he's managed to get the revered position he holds. For someone who thinks he's an actual journalist he is an atrocious interviewer. Over the years, he's been in the right place at the right time is all I can come up with. He started bigging up Fontaines DC and that did give me the collywobbles. Just fuck off Steve.

Gregory Torso

I think anyone who compares this to Slint is severely missing everything that makes Spiderland such an incredible record. This has all of the right-sounding pieces put together, but there's no atmosphere, there's nothing organic about it. Slint were four weird kids practising the same six songs over and over for a year in a basement with nothing to inform them on how it should sound, coming up with something shaped by their personalities and environment. No one is ever going to be able to make a record like Spiderland, it's like trying to copy Trout Mask Replica or Torch Of The Mystics. I blame Mogwai for taking the dynamics of bands like Slint and Rodan and simplifying them into "quiet bit... quiet bit building... LOUD BIT... quiet again... building... LOUD CRESCENDO feel emotions now" leading to all those shite bands with names like And So I Exploded From Afar Like A Glittering Dog Poo In The Sky. Sorry to jump on the hatewagon, but that's just my opinion.

jobotic

Agree. And Spiderland wasn't even that big on quiet LOUD was it?

They had already done the wonderful Tweez hadn't they? Produced by Albini. My copy of Spiderland has a review of it by Albini that I cut out of the Melody Maker stuck in it. And yet I know very little about Slint, how did anyone get to hear of them to put out their records? 

Pauline Walnuts

I like 'em, saw 'em live a couple of times. They do have one song that sounds like Slint, they also have another one that sounds like The Admiral by Shellac. both of which sail to close to plagiarism to be honest, but apart from that they do make an interesting noise. A lot more mid 90s Post-Rock than post-punk.

Also they released the Test-pressing of their album as a limited edition signed special thingy on their web-site.

500 copies.


holyzombiejesus

That's recently become a thing, hasn't it? Offering a test pressing as a prize for anyone pre-ordering the album, or just selling the things. How do you get 500 test pressings? Are they mixing them up with white labels or something?

chveik


The Mollusk

Quote from: Gregory Torso on February 12, 2021, 01:45:42 PM
I think anyone who compares this to Slint is severely missing everything that makes Spiderland such an incredible record. This has all of the right-sounding pieces put together, but there's no atmosphere, there's nothing organic about it.

This is in line with my thoughts on it, too. I found the album tolerable in that the musicianship is decent and the longer songs do a fairly decent job of building up to a satisfying crescendo or conclusion, and I can see that it's massively informed by what Slint did, but it is in no way comparable to them beyond that. "Spiderland" is tangible, it's chunky in places and delicate in others, it's bugged out and it exists in its own weird headspace. Relatively speaking, "For the first time" is far too amiable and agreeable in its execution for it to sound even half as engaging as "Spiderland". Similarly, compare it to the debut album by their contemporaries black midi, and they don't even come close. "Schlagenheim" is fucking electrifying, sonically it's all over the place but it's so propulsive and gripping through the big bits and the small bits. There's nowt really like that here.

"Instrumental" (wry title there, so cool, wow) piqued my interest from the get go, but all too soon my thoughts turned to "right, they've added another layer, okay" and it eventually outstayed its welcome by at least a full minute. The addition of vocals and more diverse structure on the subsequent tracks did make them more interesting but the sound of the album is so tediously flat throughout. There's nothing dynamic or gripping here, aside from the predictable climax sections or occasional noisy breakdown bits like on "Science Fair", which are too infrequent or else still too obvious to elicit any proper excitement out of me. I was not excited by this album at all. And the lyrics are shit. There's no other way I can think to describe this except pleasant and inoffensive - and yes, I'm afraid that does make them perfect drive-time 6 Music fodder.

They should change their name to Bland Country, Middle of the Road.

VelourSpirit

#26
Quote from: amputeeporn on February 11, 2021, 10:47:01 PM
Obviously any lyric quoted in isolation can look bad - especially when a band or lyricist like this is clearly trying to be out there on the borderline, but imo rather that than more awful songwriting living in a futureless, airless, past where the internet never happened - still singing about babies and rhyming older with colder. Like it or not, the internet should be the modern day metaphor in our lives. At least, occasionally.
It's even worse hearing it delivered out loud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiEXmOzTxIg
Not saying no-one can do songs about the internet at all, to say that would be more arbitrary than not wanting to hear songs about phones or televisions, but this is a load of embarrassing wank like Black Mirror at its most trite. And that Kendall Jenner one, CHRIST

wosl

#27
Second mention of this lot I've come across after spotting them billed on the cover of Uncut or Mojo as "the best new band in Britain" or similar (way to hamstring them when they've barely cleared the blocks). The ungainly name, completely lacking in spark or euphoniousness (almost a must, if your name is going to feature a comma), isn't filling me with a lot of confidence.  Off to have a listen, lads.

Edit: even if the name comes from/is derived from an old title or quote, it's still a flavourless mouthful

wosl

Listened to 'Science Fair.' Lead vocalist sings in a wavery, almost Nick Cave in narration-mode parody style (I've moaned about the style of the vocalist from Arrange before, and the oh-what-a-wretch-I-am singing of yer BC(,)NR man, even if parodic/ironic, doesn't fall too far short).  I won't be able to go any distance with this lot if he always affects that style.  The music isn't bad at all; nothing shattering, but nimble and spirited.  You probably have to have a young sponge of a brain to be able to extract a spark of anything fresh from this; too much of it is hitting receptors long worn-down in mine.

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: wosl on February 12, 2021, 07:26:37 PM
You probably have to have a young sponge of a brain to be able to extract a spark of anything fresh from this; too much of it is hitting receptors long worn-down in mine.

I think that's very fair. Sometimes this place is a bit like the balcony in The Muppets. I'm giving the album a first listen right now and I quite like it, it's fun. It's not earth shattering or anything but I'm glad some kids not long out of their teens are making music like this.