The New Sound - Geordie Greep
By Miles Silverstein
Let me start by saying that this record made my earth move. So if you wanna avoid lengthy, obsessive rambling, this is your out. Otherwise, carry on at your own risk.
When the smoke clears, what is left?
On 10th August 2024, Geordie Greep took to Instagram Live to write the following three comments:
“No more black midi”
“It’s iver”
“Over”
In a swift moment of spontaneity, Greep confirmed the fears of black midi fans around the world: the band’s mysterious disappearance was in fact, a result of a behind-the-scenes indefinite hiatus. What nobody knew was that Greep was sitting on a completed solo album of his own entitled The New Sound.
In their twilight hours, black midi seemed to be on a creative tear. Their final tours added a great deal of unreleased material into their live sets. Songs like ‘Faster Amaranta’, ‘Askance’, ‘Lumps’, and ‘The Magician’ were often heralded as highlights of late-era black midi performances. These tracks quickly became fan favourites, despite existing solely in shaky YouTube uploads, SoundCloud bootlegs, and shoddy attempts at Genius lyric pages rife with question marks and “[indecipherable]” placeholders.
Fast forward to 4th October, and The New Sound has been made available everywhere.
Coming alive from the first seconds of track one, ‘Blues’, Greep is eager to show the world he means business. Over breakneck guitar riffs and fellow black midi member Morgan Simpson’s machine-gun-fire rhythm, Greep spits a scathing indictment of the vapid underbelly of the machismo of young adulthood. The tune rips by like a runaway train, despite every metaphor, lick, or percussive passage warranting dedicated time to digest; it’s the kind of music that begs second, third, fourth listens just to wrap your head around, and Greep’s band – they’re just that good. As an album opener it is a layered statement of purpose: try your best to keep up, even though it’s impossible by design.
As ‘Blues’ comes to a screeching halt, ‘Terra’ opens with funky auxiliary percussion, reminding the listener The New Sound is not a black midi record, it’s Greep howling at the moon; half of this project was recorded in Sao Paulo with street musicians(!) and all of it was written by a man feeling his freedom. ‘Terra’ boasts metaphors of voyeurism over an eerie minor samba, with Greep guiding the listener through “the museum of human suffering.” He inhabits a depraved narrator stopping to marvel at such fantastical installations as “the carcass of our saviour who rose from the dead,” “victims of drought and famine,” and most prominently, his own “punctured bleeding heart of desire.” It furthers the record’s tendency to shine a flashlight on the grotesque desires of men hiding behind their demands to be loved and fucked, or even just tolerated.
Throughout The New Sound, Greep inhabits vermin scattering back into hidey-holes, caught revelling in their own depravity. Few tracks are more up front about it than ‘Holy, Holy’, the album’s lead single. An upbeat latin plastic funk groove backs up a seedy man looking to pick up a lonely woman at a bar. Through his sheer aura, pick-up lines, and macho charisma, the man’s monologue proclaims he can have anyone with ease. The chorus lets the world know: “All the revolutionaries, all the Jihadis too, everyone knows I’m holy, holy, holy holy.” Something’s amiss, though. A successful person is out of place among the basement dwellers of ‘Blues’ and ‘Terra’, and sure enough he is exposed at last. ‘Holy, Holy’ unravels at the 3:45 mark, and as the instrumental turns to a wash of legato chords and long-held notes lacking in form or repetition, Greep’s trademark sprechgesang starts to fill with a series of requests. To get to the bar no later than 10 PM. To be “dressed like a sophisticated tart with too much makeup on.” For it to seem like he and her had never met before. He punctuates the series of requests with a single question that recontextualizes the entire song: “How much will that cost?” The entire first verse crumbles under the knowledge that this narrator has paid a prostitute to engage him meticulously in every subtlety of the dance of seduction. He has no interest in sex, only the appearance that he’s important. He wants to feel like something, and can only get that from women he pays. It’s a tragic tale, and would be too dispiriting to follow if it weren’t for the catchiness of the instrumental arrangement.
The New Sound features only one instrumental song, the five minute title track. ‘The New Sound’ is a suave piece of future funk, equal parts Masayoshi Takanaka and Milton Nascimento. Bells and whistles crop up in the margins, strange backing vocals lend an edginess, ululating horns drive the beat, a bubbly high-register bass solo induces as much stank-face as head-cocking, and it’s all over before you know it.
‘Walk Up’ is a tip of the hat to the admittedly large contingent of fans incapable of letting go of black midi cold turkey. While the studio recording passes on the grit and edge of those final black midi shows, when it was still ‘Lumps’, when Cameron Picton’s stage presence filled arenas and Kaidi Akinnibi’s saxophone still wailed in the space between notes, ‘Walk Up’ gifts the listener a far more lush instrumental and Geordie Greep’s layered lyricism takes centre stage. Doors and windows, closing and opening. And what of that outro? ‘Walk Up’ is the only song on the record with a dedicated outro, a thirty second slide guitar quasi-country rodeo romp about a man who “ain’t got no home!” The YouTube stream premiere of this moment in the record saw the live chat get inundated with invocations of “WEEN,” and for this writer, that is one of the highest possible compliments to an artist’s versatility.
A french horn, bass, and acoustic guitar usher in horns and drums rolling out the carpet for ‘Through a War’, the moment on The New Sound where it is most obvious that the majority of the players are Brazilian Bossa Nova special forces. “Tonight we’re gonna drink ‘till the streets sound like music… and the music is just noise,” Greep leads, introducing lyricism about feeling larger than life in the context of armed conflict. He is no stranger to writing songs about war – black midi’s 2022 album Hellfire touched on the topic with lead single ‘Welcome To Hell’ and closer ‘27 Questions’ – yet this time his main character is not the one impacted, but the villain, the perpetrator, himself. Don’t be fooled by the smoothness of the instrumentation, ‘Through a War’ is about overpowering those who stand no chance against you. Greep’s narrator takes what he wants and basks in the spoils of conflict, making his primitive subjects build a castle for him, a statue in the square, and carve his name on every piece of gold. ‘Through a War’ contains some of the most inventive and inspired music on The New Sound, a sleeper track that is sure to grow on critics and fans alike in the months and years to come.
‘Bongo Season’ sneaks in with organ work that could be fresh off the fingers of prime Joe Zawinul. It is the shortest song on The New Sound, coming in at only 2:35 (about ten minutes shorter than ‘The Magician’) and only boasting a single stanza of lyrics followed by the words “Bongo Season” sung four times. That’s it. That’s the entire song. And you know what? That’s all it needs to be. In a record full of long epics built of all different sorts of futuristic originality, a two-and-a-half-minute lax palate cleanser about how great bongos are might just fit right in and allow for the rest of the record to be as experimental as it is.
If ‘Walk Up’ is a nod to the time Geordie Greep spent with black midi, then ‘Motorbike’ is a tribute to the time black midi spent at the Windmill. ‘Motorbike’ is sung by Seth Evans (aka Shank, to the real ones…) and features the noisy melancholic dissonance characteristic of that Windmill scene and Evans’ other band, the art-rock outfit HMLTD. That whole Windmill scene has by-and-large fizzled out, living only in the history books now, and Greep and Evans have taken to the studio to eulogise it over these six minutes. The lyrics stop three minutes in, and the back half is all noise and distortion. Yes, there’s been a good deal of melodic bossa-prog – even that is reductive classification – but don’t forget that Greep still knows how to blow your ears out with some downright filth.
If you thought nine tracks in, that you’d seen the limit of the man’s musical versatility, you’d be sorely mistaken. ‘As if Waltz’ starts off in a chugging 4/4, taking a minute to live up to its name, switching time signatures and tempo to inhabit the characteristic 3/4 of the waltz. Every instrument used in the first minute goes silent, their places taken by a string quartet with a faint synth drone and improvisational acoustic guitar. Greep sings passionately and wistfully of the seemingly innocuous things he wishes he could do with his newfound lover, but if there’s one thing to be picked up from The New Sound so far, it’s that there’s a catch waiting round the corner of all falsely beautiful “love songs.” When the first section returns at the end of the waltz, sure enough, you guessed it, it’s revealed he’s projecting his desire of true love onto a prostitute. The dynamism of this song really highlights the difference between his artistic ambition from 2019’s Schlagenheim to now and beyond. His noise rock and spoken word sensibilities have been swapped out for cabaret and bossa, and he’s trained his voice up to meet the occasion. Nowhere is this more apparent than five minutes into ‘As if Waltz’, where during a full baroque fugue section – which must be heard to be believed – he convincingly belts out a C5. Now with spread wings, it seems as if the impressive moments on black midi albums were simply only scratching the surface of Geordie Greep’s talent and ability.
‘The Magician’ is second to last in the tracklist, but is undoubtedly the centrepiece of the record nonetheless. The second of the two once-black-midi songs on The New Sound, ‘The Magician’ has lived many lives over the years. It’s been performed with nearly every musician in Greep’s orbit, from Picton and Simpson and Evans, to The Swing Boys back in the early solo days, to the odd Greep solo acoustic show. It is a behemoth of a song, coming in at 12:20, and emblematic of the album’s mission statement. ‘The Magician’ is a flooring epic about the fallout after an acrimonious breakup rife with beautiful, brain-tickling metaphors and similes ranging from Nabokov to the Schwarzwald. Greep’s vocals are pained and pleading for every minute of the runtime – it is doubtless his opus, a suite that travels from section to section, each of them disjoint, each of them heartwrenching, yet none of them clearly superior to the rest. Every other tale woven, every other story spun, every life invented in the first nine songs, they all point here. It is the culmination of The New Sound’s ethos, and no sum of words may grasp at the emotion evoked. In the interest of leaving the experience unspoiled, I will stop writing here. Play the song. It is life-changing.
‘If You Are But a Dream’ acts as a sort of epilogue. It’s a Sinatra cover only a few seconds longer than ‘Bongo Season’, and The New Sound’s most straightforward piece. The instrumentation is only piano, drums, bass, horns, and voice. The falling action of the album is illustrated by a simple crooner ballad. After ‘The Magician’, one’s capacity for more spectacle is doubtless limited. Let ‘If You Are But a Dream’ wash over you and punctuate the journey – the album is through, and you may re-enter the world.
A justified criticism of The New Sound is the hubris or pretension it takes to refer to your own record as a departure from the rest of your catalogue. Adding fire to the flame, the first two singles released – ‘Holy, Holy’ and ‘Blues’ – seemed to be only minimal departures from black midi’s noise-adjacent prog-punk. However, upon the record’s release, I have seen this line of criticism completely snuffed out. This is due to the fact that The New Sound really puts its money where its mouth is and gives the listener a whole new side of Geordie Greep – a new sound, indeed. The songs on the album written the earliest certainly still bear the mark of Cameron Picton and Morgan Simpson’s contributions, yet it is clear that the rest of the tracklist was born of a genuine departure. The latin groove of ‘Through a War’, the jazz fusion of ‘Bongo Season’, and the baroque section of ‘As if Waltz’ all signify an artistic maturity beyond his roots, the calling card of an artist eager to spread his wings into an undoubtedly bright future. The New Sound is one of the most inventive, fresh, and spectacular records released in recent history, a layer cake made with genius and love waiting to be savoured and digested over many sittings.
The New Sound is out now courtesy of Rough Trade Records.