Black Country, New Road’s Forever Howlong is Lovely
Black Country, New Road’s third studio album Forever Howlong delightfully captures the mystery and wonder of the Cambridge sextet’s fantastical world, laden with pop culture references, whimsical and sporadic rhythms, and a flurry of fervent instrumentation in every song. In this new era of the band, no longer defined by pretentious comparisons to Slint or Arcade Fire, they now have three women vocalists (Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw) who sing bizarre stories accompanied by an occasional banjo riff from Charlie Wayne, a steel guitar from Luke Mark, or a boisterous alto saxophone solo from Lewis Evans, among enough other instruments to give the PARC a run for its money.
In this album, the group brings a completely new aesthetic that’s difficult to pinpoint to the thematic breakdowns and intense drum-smashing moments of their previous two albums. Imagine a rabbit hopping perfectly from leaf to leaf in midair on a beautiful sunny day, in a mystical world where all tragedies are solved by sticking close to our friends, to whom we are all physically connected like branches on a tree. Forever Howlong is an album that will make you skip in the middle of the road, hug your friends, tap your feet, and fall in love with the Sun.
Everything about Forever Howlong feels both synchronized and sporadic, with every song addressing conflict and anxiety through a lens of warmth and love. Perhaps the lyric with the most lasting impression is on the closing track “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me),” in which Ellery beautifully belts, “I’m falling in love with a fear I believe in,” which falls in line with the interwoven themes of finding light in darkness to embrace the absurdity of life and speak soliloquies to its beauty. A favorite of mine off of the album would be “Salem Sisters,” in which Hyde’s nostalgic vocals dance a tango around chopping piano chords before waltzing in between eerie mandolin flutterings, accompanied by the other two vocalists’ backing harmonies, as they do a call and response with Hyde, which adds on delightfully to the bizarre storytelling about grilled quail thighs, pharaohs, and transistors.
The album cover art, along with the art for singles “Besties,” “Happy Birthday,” and “For the Cold Country,” is done by Portland artist Jordan Kee, whose website describes his art style as “draw[ing] heavily from surrealism, symbolism, Neo-expressionism and primitivism”. The artwork appears to be a humanoid figure with cosmic-looking eyes, blurred in shades of red and orange, with a solar-shaped head. This fits in with the surreal and wondrous elements of the album’s lyricism, along with the general warm thematics of its instrumentation.
Black Country, New Road is playing at the Roseland Theater in Portland on Friday, May 23, supported by Brooklyn singer-songwriter duo Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman.