Ants From Up There - Black Country, New Road (2022)

I won’t get too breathless here, but let me chime in along with what everybody else is saying: This is one hell of a record.

It’s sort of pointless to come up with the best combination of genres or comparison artists to describe this music. It’s jazzy, and poppy, and it rocks, but it’s none of those things individually. The songs are often stretched to their limits (past their limits, maybe. I was in the car on the first listen and during Basketball Shoes I looked several times and said “holy shit it’s still the same song”). These songs and lyrics are funny and heartbreaking. The music goes off in more directions than you can count.

Tracks I liked:

Chaos Space Marine - a concentrated dose of awesome

Concorde - as slow and purposeful as the previous track is driving and wild

The place where he inserted the blade - I don’t know what to make of it, but it’s great