Basketball Shoes

Two days before Ants From Up There was released, Isaac Wood announced he was leaving Black Country, New Road. The album he was departing from — the one that had just been completed, that the band had spent years building toward — was a farewell he hadn’t framed as one until suddenly it was. “Basketball Shoes” closes that album, and knowing the context does not make it easier to hear. It makes it harder.

The track is twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds divided into three acts, and the band describes it as “essentially a medley of the whole album.” The opening movement is intricate and delicate — the seven-piece arrangement operating at a whisper, Wood’s voice moving through images of loss and tenderness with the oblique precision that characterizes his best writing. The second movement escalates. By the third, it has become something massive: saxophone, violin, full band in a climax that several critics compared to “Marquee Moon” and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

What distinguishes Black Country, New Road from their peers is the degree to which genuine instrumental virtuosity serves emotional expression rather than displaying itself. Every musician in this band is exceptional; none of them plays to demonstrate that. The saxophone line in “Basketball Shoes” could only have come from someone who understood exactly what the moment needed and had the technique to deliver it.

“I’m not going to pretend / That I don’t know what this is.”

Pitchfork gave Ants From Up There a 9.0. NME called “Basketball Shoes” “a gut-wrenching epic of Dostoevskian proportions.” Neither description is wrong, though both are insufficient. What “Basketball Shoes” delivers in its final minutes is the specific kind of overwhelming beauty that arrives when you realize something is ending and the ending is also, somehow, the most complete expression of what it was.

Isaac Wood has not performed with the band since. The song remains.