Black Midi, Hellfire
It’s not just pop divas like Adele, Amy Winehouse and FKA Twigs graduating from Brit School. The original four members of Black Midi got together there as students in late 2010 and have followed a quirky experimental path ever since. Their early outings weren’t much different from Captain Beefheart’s notoriously indigestible benchmark, Trout Mask Replica, and their subsequent two Rough Trade albums feature frenetic, herky-choppy song structures that have left reviewers reaching for new genre titles like “post-punk prog-rock.” . ‘ and ‘after all’.
Perhaps eager to take some distance from those Brit School origins, Black Midi can be outspoken in separating itself from the pop mainstream. In a recent interview, the always uncompromising frontman Geordie Greep described: Ed Sheeran as “a greedy piece of shit” making “the worst music of the last 100 years”.
When I saw the group on stage at St John-at-Hackney Church in May 2021, the initial Covid lockdown seemed to have driven them into a frenzy of indecision about their own direction, as they rampaged through styles of music – jazz, reggae. , folk, blues and more – while all dressed in chef’s whites. At the time, they were an instrumentally gifted ensemble that desperately needed to unwind and find out who they were as performers.
Now stripped down to a trio, with guests, their third album moves somewhat toward answering that question. While still manic in its pace-changing frenzy, Hellfire is more approachable and organized as the production by Björk engineer Marta Salogni creates some order amid the chaos at varying speeds.
In bassist Cameron Picton’s songs, Still and Eat Men Eat, orchestral enhanced passages bring a blissful West Coast serenity reminiscent of Love’s hippie classic Forever Changes, while Welcome To Hell, despite its forbidding title, hangs on a scratchy Grip. guitar riff that returns often enough to build something that has been completely absent from Black Midi’s music until now: groove.
Now that some of the cacophonous clutter has been cut out, Greep, in particular, emerges as a storyteller who deals with grotesques. In the nightmarish-sounding finale, 27 Questions, he wonders, “Is there a marriage that can survive castration?”. With his singing-talking style, he actually resembles a Broadway crooner – from hell. Andrew Perry