In the middle of Hellfire, the final album by British art-rockers Black Midi, lurked a song called Still. It was easy to overlook. As you may recall, Hellfire was a rock opera that – even by the standards of rock operas, seldom the first place to look for a linear, elevator-pitch-friendly plot – made no sense whatsoever: there was some business about a boxing match, an actor who exploded on stage, and a set of army recruits with names such as Tristan Bongo and Mrs Gonorrhoea. It was admittedly difficult to pay attention to the narrative, distracted as one was by the sound of Black Midi continually doing their nut in their traditionally maximalist style: scrabbly riffs, jagged chords, free-blowing sax, bursts of noise, cocktail jazz interludes, Beefheartian rhythms, bursts of accordion, the sound of the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio etc. Amid all that, what price a sweetly lambent acoustic track, with a little country and a dab of bucolic Canterbury prog in its DNA, sung not by frontman Geordie Greep in one of his apparently fathomless array of funny voices, but by bassist Cameron Picton, a man possessed of an understated, guileless vocal style?
Cover art for My New Band Believe. Photograph: Rough Trade Records
It’s hard not to think of Still when considering Picton’s first post-Black Midi album as My New Band Believe, recorded with a host of left-field and improv-friendly musicians, among them veteran drummer Steve Noble, once of skronky 80s post-punk hellraisers Rip Rig + Panic. While Greep’s 2024 solo debut The New Sound offered the full sonic smorgasbord familiar to Black Midi fans – all the sudden leaps from samba to heavy riffing and Zappa-ish jazz-rock your heart might desire – My New Band Believe’s eponymous debut could be read as an album that takes Still as its starting point.
Its sound is entirely acoustic, the live-sounding recordings of fingerpicked guitar, double bass, piano and percussion augmented by string arrangements. Its lyrics largely abandon the flights of fancy that characterised his old band’s oeuvre in favour of a more direct approach. There’s definitely a hint of Black Midi’s penchant for the grotesque in the revenge fantasy of opener Target Practice – “If we see you on a spike with holes for your eyes / we’ll just keep practising our aim” – but more often they alight on more prosaic topics. Love Story conjures up an apparently earnest vision of lost domestic contentment – a now-split couple humming along to the radio while cooking dinner, conjured with the aid of sound effects – while Opposite Teacher ruminates on fatherhood.
Even so, from the moment that the arrangement turns dissonant on second track In the Blink of an Eye, you’re reminded that understated is very much a relative term. If My New Band Believe take a more subtle tack – and seem noticeably more concerned with melodies – than Black Midi, they still deal in songs that are episodic and strange.
It feels telling that Picton initially approached Van Dyke Parks to orchestrate them, even if the co-author of the Beach Boys’ legendary Smile proved sadly out of his price range: if My New Band Believe is less kaleidoscopic in stylistic range, there’s something of the fidgety restlessness of Parks’s lauded 1967 album Song Cycle in the songs’ unexpected key changes and shifts in mood and pace.
Over the course of its eight minutes, Heart of Darkness moves between a Pentangle-esque blend of folky guitar and jazzy drums, a kind of breezy acoustic soft rock and a sparse, ominous and seemingly improvised coda of guitar harmonics and a disconcerting sound that could be feedback or strings. Actress is filled with sweet melodies, again in a folk/jazz vein, but it’s also full of pregnant pauses, tempo changes and surges in volume: it doesn’t so much end as peter out, as if everyone concerned has exhausted themselves in the process of performing it.
That the album doesn’t exhaust the listener – as Black Midi were wont to do – might be due to its constant sense of movement being contained by the instrumentation, and to the smoothness of its continual transitions. The result is an album that feels less distant, less inclined to showboating, easier to love – rather than merely admire – than Picton’s previous work, without ever feeling like it’s pandering to the listener. It’s admirably unbound by things such as standardised song structure, feels difficult to accurately pigeonhole and comes teeming with musical ideas from out of the ordinary – but it feels like it’s wearing its intelligence a little more lightly than its author once did, which might be the smartest move of all.
This week Alexis listened to
Beth Orton – The Ground Above
There’s a sense that Beth Orton is an undervalued artist, precisely because she has never let her quality control dip for thirtysomething years, a point proved by The Ground Above’s racked expansiveness.