Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Pretty astonishing: Black Country, New Road’s Ants From Up There reviewed

There are still pockets of brilliance in pop. The rewards from this youngish Cambridge band are immense

issue 19 February 2022

Grade: A+

It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new music being made. Just almost nothing new and almost nothing good. The majority is indeed toxic landfill, rehashes of that least appealing of decades, the 1980s, and performed by pasty-faced, limp-wristed, deluded woke idiots whose chief concern is to tell you their gender.

But there are yet pockets of brilliance, just as there were in 1975 and 1995 — and this youngish Cambridge band (the only other place they could have come from is Oxford) inhabit one of those pockets. Upon completion of this, their second album, the lead singer Isaac Wood left the band because, so far as I could tell from his confused message on the band’s website, he was going round the bend.

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