Once you look for them, you find rib jabs everywhere in black midi’s music, indicating that all this just might be, at least in part, a put-on.Īs they’ve progressed, black midi have become increasingly interested in play-acting and costume as songwriting prompts. On Hellfire’s finale “27 Questions,” Greep portrays a preening actor named Freddie Frost, who prances about the stage and trills pseudo-profundities to a credulous audience. Greep’s lyrics often cast a jaundiced eye on fraudulent performers and their fickle audiences: On Cavalcade’s final track, a composer named Markus attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing 65 ascending fourths in a row because “everyone loves” them, only to be dragged out in chains. It’s the voice of the classic Hollywood flim-flammer, the confidence man, the “trouble right here in River City” type. As a vocalist, Greep’s motor-mouthed yammer channels old black-and-white newsreels and wartime propaganda films. Along with Cavalcade’s ode to Marlene Dietrich, the moment underscores the hint of Weimar cabaret in their music, with its exaggerated gestures and cheery bad faith. The curtain opens on Hellfire with a creaky, arthritic march rhythm straight out of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera.
In the right light, black midi sounds less like the work of zealots and more like kids who have beaten every level and are now trying again with the controller upside down. The absurdity of high-level performance, the cosmic humor in any mortal human growing this proficient at basically anything, radiates from their music. The members have been playing together since their teens, and their technical command, by now, borders on preposterous. Music that vibrates at this frequency simply does not get made without lunatic commitment.īut there is a knowing wink buried within the music’s hairpin turns and dissonances. The lyrics are dense and specific enough to wonder if the soldier character named Tristan Bongo (from “Welcome to Hell”) might have served under the homophobic, screaming captain from “Eat Men Eat,” or if the diamond miner who died and became a diamond himself (from Cavalcade’s “Diamond Stuff”) might have been buried in the dirt beneath the feet of the post-apocalyptic preacher and cult leader of “ John L.” You can find multiple Reddit threads devoted to why Greep keeps mentioning anteaters.
Their compositions don’t feel arranged so much as welded together at impossible angles according to the precise calculations of aeronautical engineers. There are nine or ten tabs open in any ten seconds of black midi music-themes, sub-themes, recurring characters, historical references. Of course you are meant to take this shit seriously.
When compared with their inky-black music, which throbs with a terrible intensity, Greep's insistence on “fun” seems like special pleading.
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