If Geordie Greep’s run with Black Midi told us anything, it’s that he’d rather you not get too comfortable. The band’s three albums offered a confounding fusion of technical brilliance, gnarly imagery and proggy pomp that left you convinced you didn’t know the half of what was really going on. Emerging only months after their split was confirmed (in suitably confusing fashion), his debut solo record proves that, in that regard, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Recorded between São Paulo and London during Black Midi’s final throes, ‘The New Sound’ is just as disorienting and discomfiting as Greep’s previous work, but it is tonally distinct. Here, in the company of more than 30 session musicians, he leans hard into Steely Dan smut, música popular brasileira and snaking rhythms. Add the lyrics about the imagined lives of loser men who, almost invariably, brag and sneer before being exposed as empty shells, and there’s a distinct lounge lizard sheen to it all. But whenever you momentarily feel like you have a handle on something, it’s undercut by an outlandish turn of phrase, a shift in perspective or, halfway through the opening song ‘Blues’, a kick drum salvo that rewires your brain.
There is tension throughout between the quality of the playing, which is executed at dazzling speed without sacrificing anything in the way of feel, and the disconnect and disorientation created by the many layers of meaning, counter-meaning and ironic distance that define Greep’s approach to lyrical concepts and character work. This wasn’t really an issue with Black Midi, a band whose appeal was partly founded upon overwhelming the listener, whether with volume, breakneck tempo switches, or blizzards of notes.
On ‘The New Sound’, though, Greep is neck deep in styles that lend themselves to listener participation beyond head-nodding and slack-jawed awe. More specifically, this is music for dancing. But he still wants the listener to know that, on some level, they’re being messed with. There are moments where Greep does square this circle, thanks to the deft melodic swerves of ‘Through the War’, for example, or the skronking guitars and horns of ‘As If I Waltz’, but otherwise this is a record that’s very much in its own head. It’s not necessarily trying to be clever – more that the sheer weight of its many ideas crushes the more visceral response that its obvious instrumental swagger demands from its listener.
