The Sampler: Black Country, New Road; Karl Steven; Mitski

Tony Stamp treats his ears to a trend-bucking second album by UK whizz-kids Black Country, New Road; the solo debut of Supergroove frontman and award-winning screen composer Karl Steven; and a self-reflexive collection of glum songs by Japanese-American songwriter Mitski.

Ants Up There by Black Country, New Road

A recent article in the UK publication The Quietus expressed exhaustion with something that has begun to saturate British music. Sprechgesang means ‘spoken voice’ in German and refers to a vocal technique that falls somewhere between speaking and singing.

It’s an approach dating back to the late 1800s, but this recent trend seems to have been sparked by the duo Sleaford Mods, and now includes a long list of acts like Dry Cleaning, Shame, Idles, and Yard Act - the band who The Quietus suggests might be the straw that broke this particular camel’s back. 

Which brings us to Black Country, New Road, whose first album trafficked in sprechgesang, and drew deafening praise from critics. In every sense, they seem like a band ahead of the curve, and that extends to ditching the spoken word altogether for their sophomore outing Ants From Up There, and going all-in on extremely heartfelt singing. 

This is an atypical band in several senses. There are seven members, for one thing (or at least there were until recently, but we’ll get to that later), including the usual bass, drums, guitar and keys, plus a saxophonist and violin player. In interviews they stress the band’s diplomacy - all the songs are written, or at least completed, communally.

That means influences range from Arcade Fire (who they frequently cite), to Jewish Klezmer, which violinist Lewis Evans and saxophonist Georgia Ellery have a background in. Which leads to songs like ‘Chaos Space Marine’ feeling undefinable, aside from a sort of Tom Waits carnival barker feel.

Black Country, New Road are clearly a live band first and foremost - tempos shift, and playing is expressive rather than studio-polished. In fact, they got their live sound engineer to produce this album, which was a first for him. These are songs that build and swell rather than loop. 

Their first album For The First Time was recognisably the same band, but the songs were a bit more abrasive, drawing on things like post-punk. They set out here to make something more accessible, and even tried to keep the songs around the three-minute mark. They mostly failed in that regard, but the album is much better for it.

The highlight for me is ‘The Place Where He Inserted The Blade’, which over seven minutes combines the slow simmer of post-rock acts like Godspeed You! Black Emperor with chamber pop, letting singer Isaac Wood really build up a head of steam before channelling Jarvis Cocker at his most unhinged. 

All the members of Black Country, New Road are in their early twenties, and by their own admission there's a youthful zest to proceedings; a feeling of striving toward something, even if you’re not quite sure what. That hunger extends to other musical pursuits - they have a collaborative project with the band Black MIDI, and violinist Georgia Ellery is one half of the buzzed-about duo Jock Strap.

If you’re a dance music fan, it’s notable that bassist Tyler Hyde is the daughter of Karl Hyde, one half of electronic titans Underworld. 

There’s real musical maturity where it matters - throughout the album members will pull back and let their bandmates parts breathe, and often, like the winkling keys, violin and sax on the song ‘Haldern’. 

Black Country, New Road are a communal band through and through, but the defining element of this album is Isaac Wood’s singing, dramatic and slightly broken. The bad news hanging over this release is that four days prior to it coming out, he left the band, citing mental health struggles. 

Full of praise and affection for his former bandmates, he specified ‘I have been feeling sad and afraid [...] it’s the kind of feeling that makes it hard to play guitar and sing at the same time’. 

The remaining members have said they’ll continue without him, and whether or not he returns to music in the future, The Ants From Up There is a triumphant note to go out on.

All of Human Emotion on Microfiche by Karl Steven

When Supergroove appeared in the NZ charts during the mid-nineties, they were a force to behold; all youthful energy and musical prowess, mashing together genres in a way that, with the benefit of hindsight, was extremely forward-thinking.

It’s slightly shocking to look back and realise that, after their first album Traction did extremely well, it was only two years later that they’d fired singer Che Fu and trumpeter Tim Stewart, and released the follow-up Backspacer, which almost sounded like a different band.

Eventually, they dissolved, but have played plenty of triumphant reunion gigs with the original lineup since then, and frontman Karl Steven went on to lead a string of bands that sounded very different to either iteration of Supergroove, including The Drab Doo-Riffs and Heart Attack Alley. 

He also spent ten years getting his PhD in philosophy and becoming an award-winning composer for film and TV. And now, over twenty years since Supergroove arrived, he’s released his first solo album.

It’s immediately obvious that this is another drastically different sound for Steven, brittle and electronic. At points this album All of Human Emotion on Microfiche reminds me of seventies synth-prog artists like Jean Michele Jarre. But it’s recognisably the same musical mind from those earlier bands, and the inclusion of Steven’s voice throughout, often speaking, is a clear throughline. 

It’s also fun to hear him employ different techniques, like the specific ‘bouncing ball’ stutter he gives the vocal sound on ‘The Message’.

These are, by Steven’s own admission, experimental compositions, but his pop instincts shine through, like the whiff of funk to that song's bassline, and the satisfaction of the beat kicking in. 

Speaking with bFM recently, he said the album came about when he found he couldn’t focus on his work composing for the screen. He said he worked on them to combat the "bad weather in [his] brain", calling them "random foolery’" which was therapeutic. He described the process as making "maps out of the funk" that had clouded his mental health.

Which marks this as a very personal album, and not one necessarily designed for release. In the press material, he says it was the label SunReturn who encouraged him to collect and release these songs, which he describes as the "sound of his mind occasionally boiling over".

Reading those quotes it's obvious that Steven is full of poetic turns of phrase, and that fuels this album too. Music aside, it’s just interesting to hear him talk about things. On ‘Utterance and Inscription’ he describes the construction of language in increasingly ambitious terms. 

Including record scratches on that track is just one of many lateral decisions here that somehow work. They were provided by Steven’s bandmate Che Fu. 

Things get noisier and more experimental on ‘Freedom Bells’, which veers close to the abrasive genre known as drill n’ bass, and ‘Tamaki 5000’ contains hints of psychobilly bands like The Cramps and Steven’s more rock-focused outlets. It also features amusing lyrics about living in Auckland.  

Karl Steven’s mother was a librarian, so maybe that inspired the title of this collection, All of Human Emotion on Microfiche. His PhD may have played a part too. He said "It’s been a nice surprise how welcoming people have been" to the songs, suggesting he thought they might be too abstract for general consumption.

But to me, despite the electronic veneer, that title is wholly apt - these tunes are clearly full of human emotion.

Laurel Hell by Mitski

Mitski Miyawaki has been releasing music for ten years now, gaining plaudits such as The Guardian calling her “the best young songwriter” in America. The Wall Street Journal described her fanbase as rivalling that of “Taylor Swift and BTS in intensity, if not size”.

The more you read about her, the more a narrative starts to form: she’s a very private person, and finds the attention that comes with her job exhausting. 

So maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when in 2019 she announced she would stop performing live indefinitely, and later said she planned to quit music entirely. Less than a year later she backtracked, partly because she still owed her record label another album, and partly because, as she told Rolling Stone, “I have to do this even though it hurts me, because this is the only thing I can do”.

Her music has always had shades of melancholy running through it, and while this latest collection is split between ghostly electronic musings and more danceable fare, at times it’s hard to shake the feeling that she’d rather be doing something else.  

On Mitski’s last album Be The Cowboy she wrote every song in character as someone else, but on this collection, called Laurel Hell, she’s back to herself, and it’s hard not to notice all the lyrics that seem to be saying how much she dislikes her job.

The song ‘Working For the Knife’, is full of lines like "I used to think I'd be done by twenty/ Now at twenty-nine, the road ahead appears the same".

It’s all very self-reflexive, and at points, exhausting. This is, after all, someone asking you to feel sorry for them for having to make the music that you’re listening to. 

Having said all this, repeat listens reveal a very enjoyable album. She’s a great songwriter, and maybe that context had influenced the way I heard these songs. Even tracks that begin somewhere dirgey, like the Velvet Underground-channelling ‘Heat Lightning’, open up into something warmer and more inviting.

I’ve read many reviews describing this album as dance-friendly, but while I get that tempo-wise, to my ears the attitude behind it is at odds with the dancefloor. 

It’s worth mentioning that Mitski is doing very well, off on a forty eight-stop tour and opening arenas for the likes of Harry Styles. I can only hope she doesn’t hate it too much. 

Laurel Hell is at its best on tracks like ‘Love Me More’, when you really feel her connecting with the song. It’s full of drama, and a chorus that seems directly at odds with what she’s said about her fanbase in the past - “I need you to love me more”.