Former Black Midi singer-guitarist Geordie Greep takes stock of contemporary masculinity with his first solo album, The New Sound. Where Black Midi constructed elaborate worlds to tell stories about boxers and soldiers on albums like 2022’s Hellfire, Greep trains his focus on the type of men who worship at the altars of celebrity influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson here, going so far as to adopt their voices and stick with them long enough to show the cracks in their pumped-up egos.
Greep writes lyrics by the paragraph and sings them frantically, as though he’s terrified that a song will run out before he gets to say everything on his mind. “Blues” savagely dissects a man who “should pay [a beggar] to follow you around and play your theme” before directing him to confront the inevitability of decay and death, yet the narrator sounds as jerky as his target.
The album demonstrates the trap of self-righteously denouncing those in Greep’s crosshairs, viewing it as a product of the same urge for domination that those men indulge in more directly. “Holy, Holy” adopts the voice of a swaggering creep who expects women to bow down before him: “Do you know my name?/Of course you know my name/Everyone does, it’s true.” Yet, by the end, the song reveals that women only put up with him as long as he pays them.
The music on The New Sound matches the size of its characters’ ambitions and emotions. The album was recorded with 30 session musicians, resulting in a maximalist piling up of sounds. Greep writes crescendos rather than hooks, creating songs that are so dense that they would be hard to replicate live, but he places far more emphasis on groove than he did with Black Midi.
While some of The New Sound sounds like Black Midi, Greep turns to piano and percussion just as often as he does guitar. His former band pulled from a wide range of influences like prog, post-punk, jazz, cabaret, and Greep returns to these inspirations—the bass-driven opening of “Blues” owes more to Primus than anything from the Delta—but also locates some new ones. “Walk Up” ends with a jokey 30-second foray into country music, while Greep tries out a crooner voice on “If You Are but a Dream.” Four songs were also recorded in Brazil.
The New Sound, which leans into often overwhelmingly loud dynamics, draws its power from its ability to keep multiple balls in the air. With everything going on during the second half of “Holy, Holy,” for example, the fact that all of the instruments are audible is a tremendous feat. But while the album aims large, in every way imaginable, beneath its enormous sound lies the unmistakable sorrow of a man crying alone.
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