By Harry Quantrill
Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
If there were ever any doubts about whether Geordie Greep was essential to a phenomenal three-album run, The New Sound lays them to rest. For the uninitiated, Greep was the frontman of the recently disbanded avant-rock four-piece Black Midi, known for busy, breakneck, and bizarre arrangements. Though some of the abrasiveness has mellowed (the strings and saxophones sing now rather than screech), the adrenaline, virtuosity, and wit remain.
Everything great about The New Sound is captured on its opening track, “Blues”: dense guitar parts, Brazilian-flavoured percussion that dances around downbeats while still maintaining stadium-rock intensity, and uncomfortable yet poetic lyricism that makes you question whether these are the ramblings of a madman or a sly mockery of the mundane. Despite all this, The New Sound is Greep’s most accessible work to date, as twangy guitars have been subsumed by prettier orchestration and syncopated samba patterns.
Greep’s surreal, implacable delivery remains on The New Sound, taking its most melodious form yet. Nowhere is its charm more noticeable than in its absence on Motorbike, where producer Seth Evans takes up vocal duties, and a Greep-shaped hole in the mix leaves the music feeling awkward. That awkwardness is partly due to lyrical content too, as Greep seems to have found his niche in jibing at – and sometimes embodying – a particular brand of pathetic machismo. Military-obsessed, sex-crazed, and conceited, it’s a persona that only feels right in the hands of someone so whimsical that you’re completely sure that it’s ironic. Greep tackles this subject matter amusingly, but it would have been refreshing to see his writing prowess applied to themes beyond misogynists and sex workers.
Some tracks, however, struggle with a growing problem in the London music scene: too-many-sections-syndrome. Every beat and riff in these songs groove – but only in a few instances are they afforded enough time to breathe before it’s onto the next one. It makes one wonder if there was a “does it resemble Bohemian Rhapsody in its structure?” marking criterion at the Brit School. Greep has earned himself a reputation as a boundary-pusher, and structural complexity is an easy way to maintain it, but Black Midi had the confidence to develop single motifs in a song – without ever losing their signature erraticism. This confidence seems to have been overtaken by an urge to showcase every musical trick in the book on The New Sound, and it suffers as a result.
