by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
When I last discussed Black Midi, it was with eager hope for another round of "capers of great suspense and revenge as this cunning [as Cavalcade]". As I spent the last year talking with compatriots and strangers alike about the trio online, we seemed to settle on one salient fact: this band is fucking ridiculous and we love them for that. No act on a tier 1 indie in recent memory has quite gone the distance to balance the line between bonafide belly-laugh amounting piss-takes like "TBE" and using 8 pages of PR to drop a cohesive band story (amongst literature/comedian recommendations and a list of “the players”).
The only logical explanation for why they would "pose in bodybuilder," provide an open mic as an opener, gesture the possibility of a cover of Peg and Yonkers, or create songs like “John L” that seemed destined to instill "a good old fashion dance" is FOR the spectacle. The spectacle is a timeless promise of a good time, and Black Midi live in service to the spectacle. They continually evolve to the theatricality of the spectacle. They will stop at nothing to conjure and bring us for the spectacle. At long last, Hellfire is their studio album level spectacle; available for home surround sound systems, car CD players, tape decks, or the transient online comatose system of the internet.
Black Midi came bearing a signature gift of batshit-good riffs and ideas. These are the kind that attract a crowd of oldhead prog nerds, Mudvayne-apologists, Primus Suckers, and... ECM heads. If you love any of those bands, genres, or labels, then you likely enjoyed black midi's last album. Everything surrounding Hellfire's cover and the sound strike up a referential sidestep of Cavalcade. There really is not a massive sonic level of difference between the two–even mending the best of Schlagenheim’s blatant veracity into this go-around. There’s still wildly eye-winking technicality mixed with left-turn bridges and instrumentation that appeases a dozen or so different types of genre nerds, alongside sincere balladry, now more swooning and oozing greater confidence.
Hellfire's status as a sequel to Cavalcade could be up for debate though. Cavalcade laid bare that the trio had a vision for a world of their own accord, far outside any other current act. Most, if not all of, Hellfire's eight stories and two interludes were being road tested with uncompromisable swagger last year. The studio cuts make it certain that Black Midi want to emphasize that the stories (the batch of music videos this time around truly are grounded lore machines) and cohesion entailed within are all in service to their own world. Cavalcade was merely a vessel to push them towards this omnibus.
Entailing a whole scourge of new and old collaborators, Hellfire is the theatrical encompassing of Midi's best impulses and storytelling prowess; suspense, revenge, and wit abound. Within seconds of starting, Geordie Greep has called us into the urgency of this endeavor. "Each day quicker, each day gone loss," is one of many lyrical sleights regarding insufficiency–all delivered within eighty seconds. It relays a tonal MO Hellfire is locked into, but not before ending with a welcome to the spectacle! The trio will then (in eleven minutes) proceed to time travel to 2163 for the tabloid spectacle of the century (“Sugar/Tzu”), back down to the diamond mines of “Diamond Stuff” (“Eat Men Eat”), and to the unassailable lunacy of war (“Welcome to Hell”). It is a tight opening trio, snug with jazzy bells and whistles, and performed with outrageous swagger. That this practically parallels a lineage of MW2 quickscope montages (Morgan Simpson's polyrhythms pulse with the quiver of rapid fire barrett hitmarkers), and parkour compilations (Cameron Picton's electric performance and the "pastoral-hadrcore" beats hit the ground running), hyperkinetic anime intros (the horns on Hellfire are fit for a swashbuckling adventure), respectively, is nothing short of a miracle. Within every listen is a new lyric to grapple with; a character to empathize or revile.
For Greep, this round of lyricism is akin to autofiction. The shift from third to first person blurs the lines of these stories. Nothing should be taken as quite real or outright fake; personal truths and ideas of either gentleman are nestled within. Enough to pique the curiosity of just what incites our narrators to imagine a world of this manner–one where personal demise can be (but not always is) equated with devilish encounters. This was suggested with concision on “Dethroned” last year, but taking the center stage of Hellfire gives each tale a greater aura as a “situated dispatch”. So few of the chaps within these stories are going to transcend their surroundings; they’re made into ghastly spectacles for us to ponder. Whose shoes do you step into best here?
The dizzying “The Race is About to Begin” might stand as the pinnacle of this. A stream of conscious tale weaving the rogue’s gallery of characters from Hellfire’s A-sde, references to South Schlagenheim and other towns, stuffed between images of ne'er-do-wells and… log cabins. Greep’s anything but unreliable, sounding of an auctioneer delivering lines like SpongeBob forcibly unspooling a grotesque truth at Squidward’s expense; syncopated to the instrumental. It’s only topped by “27 Questions,” an intimate ballroom tale told during “late [19?]‘43,” as our narrator seeks refuge in such a place “wherever’s marked admission free”. Two hours of Mr. Frost’s life later, and our narrator is left with 27–er 21 questions ranging from lunacy to earnest pleas for “the sad old oaf” to be seen.
Yet, I suppose the track I’ve contended with the most is Picton’s “Still” –a catch between Western’s laidback restraint and Marlene Dietrich’s otherworldly beauty. Yet with Picton at the wheel, this is one of his prime nuggets trading tension for quaint ambience and pastoral fusion; it truly saunters through three different types of arrangements. It’s the most outright gorgeous piece on the album, a sincere love song that still ends in tears, if not complete misery for our protagonist as they move on to “Obviously Visiting Arena,” gently whispering of a lover “a mile away but doing so good”. Picton’s economy of language is concise, not reserved; grounded enough to empathize with. It is in that succinctness that Picton continues to best convey why I feel Black Midi stands ahead of their peers: simply they just “know a song that gives everything that you need”.