When looking back on post-WWII urban renewal policies across the United States, historian Francesca Ammon isolates the figure of the bulldozer and its veneration as something that helped convince many Americans that destruction was progress. Government programs training thousands of men to operate heavy excavation vehicles plus federal subsidies to clear housing that localities deemed as substandard led to the destruction of one out of every 17 housing units nationwide with millions of acres of earth moved for interstate highways alone, with the vast majority of demolished homes never replaced. As sticky as that attitude remains today, it’s not without complication: Many see Urban Renewal as a failure that exacerbated existing problems and rightfully fear any grand scale urban investment program as a death knell for communities that are barely hanging on.
This is part of the baggage that weighs down the first single, “Killdozer,” from Madeline Johnston’s fourth album as Midwife, No Depression in Heaven. In the video, Johnston collects documentary footage from Granby, Colorado, the site of Marvin Heemeyer’s 2004 rampage in an armored bulldozer attempting to liquidate his foes. Johnston’s lyrics touch on watching your hometown disappear: “There used to be a city here / Now it’s a dying breed.” Over bleary cycles of closely held guitar, Johnston’s exercise of mourning will be familiar to anyone who’s watched the place they’ve called home grow unrecognizable through gentrification. The similarly affecting “Vanessa” is as forlorn and deliberate as an ode to a lost love, and in a sense, it is about a lost love: her van. When your life is as itinerant as Johnston’s, your vehicle becomes an extension of yourself. A love song to a dying car sounds like a joke, but in typical Midwife fashion, “Vanessa” is extremely moving, recognizing the inherent connection between car-as-vehicle and body-as-vehicle.
Midwife has never been strict on genre, but the earliest releases had clear roots in post-metal, a kind of re-contextualizing of doom’s tools in an ambient singer-songwriter format. By now, on her fourth album, Johnston has incorporated every kind of slow, deliberate style under the Midwife project, creating something with sublime beauty and pitch darkness as its primary aesthetic qualities. No Depression in Heaven draws on a variety of traditions, most interestingly bluesy post-punk in her cover of Rowland S. Howard’s “Autoluminescent” and Eurodance in her reimagining of “Better Off Alone.” Whether it’s an existing tune or a fresh composition, everything gets the Midwife treatment: subtle percussion (if any), hazy guitar loops and vocals cast through a gauzy mesh that makes them sound like transmissions from heaven. On stage, Midwife sings into a telephone, achieving a transhuman distanced effect. What she utters carries the weight of doom despite, or arguably through, its gossamer manifestation.
“Rock N Roll Never Forgets” is a glacial opener, with Johnston’s statements descending like snowflakes: “Rock ‘n’ roll will never die / Rock ‘n’ roll run for your life / Rock ‘n’ roll sees everything / Rock ‘n’ roll watch over me,” mantra after mantra that has applied to Johnston’s livelihood in the underground rockstar grind. “Droving” sounds windswept and vast as she sings to the comrades she lost in her music community, “I have loved you for so long.” On the closing title track, Johnston hovers on the word “crying” like an incantation, contrasting with the similarly titled Carter Family song that suggests there’s no deprivation in the Kingdom of Heaven. Whether there’s no want, physical or spiritual, in the afterlife is nothing Johnston can know, but it’s worth aspiring for that.
No Depression in Heaven may be an album conceived in transit fixated on the endless march forward, but it feels like an arrival for Midwife. Across four albums, Midwife’s sound has evolved from a spiritual post-metal into a wider, genre-agnostic practice of seeing the world for all its weight, its darkness, and letting yourself buckle beneath it. As measured as Johnston sounds, her delicate guitar and voice chip away at listeners who’ve been reduced to tears at her shows (there are shirts to prove it). She can apply the Midwife treatment convincingly to seemingly any song (“Better Off Alone”) and spin a meditation on impermanence into the love song of the year (“Vanessa”). No Depression in Heaven is an achievement in heavy music, something that lifers in the subculture and visitors from more conventional spaces can grasp not because she’s reduced heavy music to its lowest common denominator but because she has found a precise avenue through which to deliver profundity with an approachable beauty. Even in a life lived and enriched through perpetual motion, there’s something cleansing in stillness with a hearty sob.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.
