Cambridge outfit Black Country, New Road are difficult to describe in simple, genre-based terms. An art-rock/chamber-pop/post-everything musical collaboration that challenges what can be done with music, their records are constructed from so many layers of meaning and sound that the music itself begins to feel like it’s reconstructing itself in self-referential loops as each song goes on. In a way, it is.
At their Meow Wolf show in Denver this past Friday, BC,NR created these loops live for an audience, so in tune with each other that it felt like watching the band’s seven members speak a language we were all welcome to marvel at, but not speak ourselves. I attended with my friend (and KCSU’s music director), Jalen, who was similarly awed and the perfect person to nerd out about this show after it was finished.
The opener was Daneshevskaya (Dawn-eh-shev-sky-uh), a dreamy alt-pop band from New York whose name honors frontwoman Anna Daneshevskaya Beckerman’s Russian-Jewish heritage. Their songs were easy to get into, floaty and pulling from elements of folk, rock, shoegaze, and chamber to create a distinctive sound that primed the crowd perfectly as an opening act. The show took place in Meow Wolf’s Perplexiplex, a show space filled with so many ever-shifting colors and lights that it felt like a completely different world at times.
This felt like the perfect space to see BC,NR in: intimate but vast, grounded but uncanny. When they finally took the stage I felt like I did the first time I listened to them in 2019, like I was on the precipice of something different and incredibly exciting. BC,NR’s first few singles, “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France” came out in 2019, quickly catching the attention of fans beyond just the Windmill scene. The Windmill is a pub and live music venue in Brixton, known for its association with related acts like BC,NR, Black Midi, and other talk-y British acts that form the newest crop of post-punk and art-rock coming out of England. The band is made up of Tyler Hyde (vocals, bass), Lewis Evans (vocals, flute, saxophone), May Kershaw (vocals, keys), Georgia Ellery (vocals, violin), Charlie Wayne (vocals, drums) and Luke Mark (guitar). Notably, the former lead vocalist/songwriter Isaac Wood left the band a few days before the debut of their highly anticipated sophomore release, “Ants From Up There.” AFUT was a gloriously indulgent foray into chamber and klezmer chaos, spiraling into nose-dives of sound before immediately climbing back up again, layer upon layer of instrumentation underscoring Wood’s desperate, raw-wound vocals. The record was enough to cement BC,NR’s place in the world of music even if it was the last thing they ever did, which, for a moment following Wood’s departure, fans feared it would be.
In Wood’s absence, though, the band’s remaining members have more than risen to the occasion, taking the opportunity to evolve their sound, introduce tracks sung by multiple members, and celebrate the thing that’s most important to them with lyrics like “look at what we’ve done together / BCNR / friends forever,” which features in the opening track, “Up Song,” of their latest live record, “Live at Bush Hall.”
“Live at Bush Hall” was born from the ashes of their previous work, a new approach that still celebrates the same sorts of hallmarks that BC,NR are known for: confessional lyricism, musical improvisation, and building crescendos of sound that come tumbling down on themselves by the end of each song. These are the songs I had the privilege of seeing them perform, songs that were even better live.
Following their tradition of having themed outfits for certain nights of the show, every member of the band wore “We came, Saw, Conquered” Nuggets-themed athletic wear, congratulating us on our recent NBA Championship win. During a ten minute break where they fixed some technical difficulties, Lewis Evans (vocals, flute, saxophone) and Charlie Wayne (vocals, drums,) debuted their “tight five” of stand-up to fill the time, which mostly consisted of Evans (and the crowd) egging Wayne on to tell jokes, who gave up almost immediately. They talked with the crowd a bit, and when a fan yelled “best band ever,” they responded by assigning that title to Guns ‘N Roses instead, who were “pretty good live.”
Evans also asked about former Nuggets player “Anthony Gordon,” saying he owns a jersey, and was then corrected by fans; he was thinking of Aaron Gordon but had mixed him up with Anthony Gordon, an English footballer from Newcastle United. Leaning into the joke, when he began to sing his next song, “Across The Pond Friend,” Evans began with a sheepish “Can’t believe I said Anthony Gordon…” before getting into the song.
This casual, lighthearted approach to the show paired surprisingly well with the more dramatic flourishes of their songs; it’s comforting to see a band that are all so clearly close friends, not ones who are tense or stone-faced as they go through their songs. It’s especially nice considering Wood’s 2022 departure for mental health reasons—the old mystique of conflict-driven bands with tortured frontmen and fraught live performances might finally be consigned to a realm of the past.
BC,NR’s irreverence helps remind us that even though the scope of their music can easily eclipse your entire perspective, the show will come to an end eventually, and evolution is the only way forward. At the beginnings of songs primary vocalist Tyler Hyde would say things like “this sounds like shit,” and “I’ve never played this song on this guitar before so if it’s bad just pretend it’s good,” which added a self-effacing distance that only served to highlight how talented every member truly are. They all shined individually, but even more so together, in tune with each other’s musical needs enough to ebb and flow as the music naturally shifted into highs and lows. The instrumentation could easily build from frenetic and chaotic back to soft and careful, which it often did over the course of the night.
This slow-build technique is one of the things BC,NR are known for, and it was particularly impressive on their closing songs, “Turbines / Pigs,” “Dancers,” and “Up Song (Reprise).”“Turbines / Pigs” is primarily formed from keyboardist May Kershaw’s soft, half-spoken lyrics and unscored by gentle, supporting backing, but by the end of it we were enveloped in a shifting tide of musical chaos loud enough to vibrate in our chests. Every member gave it their all, crafting a natural disorder that still felt completely by design. Charlie Wayne’s drumming was the highlight of this performance, the multiple-minute drum solo he devolved into at the song’s climax so vigorous and frenzied that he was left panting afterwards, almost overcome by the sheer force of his crashing clangor.
“Dancers” epitomized what you’d want from a BC,NR live show, with Hyde’s resonant, whisper-soft vocals repeating “Dancers stand very still on the stage” by herself until the entire band joined in, slowly increasing the heat until all you could hear was a wall of sound of every member yelling the vocals alongside her the way they’ve done in previously-released tracks like “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade” and “Basketball Shoes.” It’s an incredibly effective technique, building up depth and intensity and becoming an artistic undertaking that forces you to become a part of it simply by being there, feeling the music sweep you up and crash down around you.
Wayne started screaming at one point, something that isn’t in the recorded version of the track, only adding to the intensity and honoring the voice-breaking vocal rampages Wood used to go on during live performances. Cascading waves of drums, saxophone, keys, violin, guitar, bass, and voices build themselves up until the only logical conclusion is to fade away again, dissolving into a mournful reprise of “Up Song,” which begins the show in a brighter, more celebratory tone and ends it in a soft, bittersweet goodbye.
The mood after a Black Country, New Road show is just as contradictory as they are: reverent but relaxed, frantic but meandering, melancholy but celebratory. Jalen and I made our way through the parking lot to their car in bouts of silence interspersed with bouts of us practically vibrating as we recapped every single moment of the show like we weren’t both standing next to each other for the entire thing. I’m grateful to have gotten to see a band that means so much to me live, and to have had an experience that I’ll be sure to cherish forever. In Denver, Black Country, New Road came, saw, and conquered.