Our pick of the albums reviewed on these pages this week is ‘For the first time’, the debut album from Black Country, New Road – here’s your chance to revisit the review and check out the album via Spotify.
“It took a while, but we’re calling it now: with the release of Black Country, New Road’s ‘For the first time’ we’ve come exactly, precisely to the opposite edge of the indie galaxy.”
“Whilst this might look like a bold claim, the evidence has been gathering for about eighteen months. From about that far back new bands like Squid, Dry Cleaning and black midi started to emerge, the only common thread that united them their differences and the oblique relationships they had with guitar rock. After listening to them though, suddenly Chelsea Dagger felt like a long, long time ago.”
“Black Country, New Road have, somewhat ridiculously, also been tagged as ‘the most divisive band in Britain’ (Question mark), a hyperbolism which speaks more to excitable headline writers than anybody who’s heard their music.”
“It’s true that the seven-piece from Cambridge are about challenging the perceptions of what regular form and structures can be, but like the fellow experimentalists they’re frequently compared with – most regularly feted 90’s autodidacts Slint – this post-everything construct is of itself still old news.”
