Just days before the release of their well-hyped sophomore outing in February 2022,
Black Country, New Road
weathered the sudden exit of their frontman,
Isaac Wood
. Rather than promote the songs from their first two albums without him, the U.K. art-folk band canceled their first American tour and immediately began writing different material to populate their live sets. An underpinning of chaos was already part of the band's mythology and this quick pivot into a new phase proved to be more exciting than disruptive. Instead of replacing
Wood
, the sextet redistributed vocals among themselves with bassist
Tyler Hyde
, saxophonist
Lewis Evans
, and keyboardist
May Kershaw
singing lead and the other three members -- violinist
Georgia Ellery
, guitarist
Luke Mark
, and drummer
Charlie Wayne
-- joining in on backup vocals. This lively all-hands-on-deck approach carried them through multiple tours and resulted in one of rock's rare occurrences: a live album of all-new material.
Live at Bush Hall
was recorded during a two-night stand in December 2022 in London and serves as a soundtrack to a concert film of the same name. The three sets from which the songs were culled were each presented as a different theme including a gathering of farmers, a haunted pizza parlor, and a prom night. While the final recording serves no central theme aside from documenting the band's wild year of reinvention, it nonetheless feels like a special event celebrating a specific moment of time. They even spell it out on the raucous opener "Up Song," which culminates in a group chant of "look at what we did together, BC,NR, friends forever!" The performances are universally lively, often with dramatic shifts inside each piece. "The Boy," a lilting suite of appealingly quaint melodies, cycles through a stage musical's worth of sections, as does the weirdly poignant "Turbines/Pigs." "Laughing Song" and "Dancers" rise to squalling peaks as the bandmembers carom around the stage together in their own distinctive musical murmuration.
remain an unpredictable and surprisingly resilient unit. Unique circumstances that would have sunk many a band -- loss of leadership, the pressures of newfound critical acclaim -- simply galvanized them into writing a new chapter in their story. ~ Timothy Monger