black midi Bristles at a Bleak World With ‘Hellfire’

War, disease, murder, exploitation, sleaze, cynicism, callousness. Humanity isn’t exactly humane in the songs on “Hellfire,” the caustic, exhilarating third album — a masterpiece — by the English band black midi.

Each song on “Hellfire” is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiom-hopping decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any moment. The lyrics present an assortment of fractured narrative strategies featuring largely unsavory characters engaging in deadly sins like lust, greed, pride and gluttony. The songs’ protagonists include killers, brutal military commanders and a performer whose last show is his own death. There’s also some grim philosophizing, like the lines Geordie Greep rattles off in “Hellfire,” which opens the album: “No such thing as luck/Only chance and rot, inevitable loss.”

But the songs don’t lament. They bristle.

The members of black midi, all in their early 20s — Greep and Cameron Picton, playing guitars and many other assorted instruments, and the indefatigable drummer Morgan Simpson — met at the BRIT School, England’s celebrated performing-arts high school. From the beginning, the band has flaunted its technical mastery and omnivorous listening, and its tastes encompass prog-rock, post-punk, pop, funk, jazz, contemporary classical music, cabaret, electronics, flamenco, noise and more.

Most black midi songs, old and new, are as frenetically choreographed as the climactic scenes of a martial-arts extravaganza. Speed, precision, complexity and sudden change have always been at the band’s fingertips, which can move incredibly fast. And while the musical and verbal constructions are meticulously cerebral, the effect is jolting and visceral.

“Schlagenheim,” black midi’s 2019 debut album — when it was a quartet including the guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin — was puristically recorded by the band members alone. But with the album “Cavalcade” in 2021, and even more so on “Hellfire,” black midi has expanded and orchestrated its songs. The contrasts of blitz and delicacy are even greater, as daintily arranged string sections or screaming winds and brass appear and vanish at will.

Even in their occasional quiet moments, the songs on “Hellfire” have a white-knuckle momentum. This album fully surfaces Simpson’s remarkable drumming, always at the service of the composition: crisp cymbal taps and surging across-the-kit rolls, high-speed fusillades and cymbal whispers, snappy marching-band snare drum, patiently repeated funk or Latin beats that suddenly explode. This time around, black midi’s music often moves so fast that Greep doesn’t bother with melody. Many of his vocals arrive spoken, working up to an auctioneer’s hyperspeed in songs like “The Race Is About to Begin,” which is not so much rapped as spewed.

A sardonic, deeply British gallows humor infuses the songs, along with the conviction that no scenario or structure is too convoluted. “The Defence” is the rationalizations of a smug brothel owner — “My girls are destined for hell or so says our priest/But find me a Christian who spends as much time on their knees” — delivered as something like a big-band show tune from a vintage Hollywood musical.

In “Dangerous Liaisons,” a farmhand becomes a hired killer who realizes that the employer who stiffs him is Satan; the music is a jazzy lilt that moves in and out of waltz time and other, much trickier meters, eventually swarmed by saxophone and brass before Greep finally barks “Futile regret!”

As if the songs don’t provide enough puzzles, black midi previewed the album with a video for “Welcome to Hell” — a gnashing, snarling, tempo-shifting chronicle of a hapless soldier’s shore leave — that had viewers deciphering a cryptic graphic alphabet.

With “Hellfire,” black midi envisions a decadent, collapsing, zero-sum culture, a war of all against all. The music — brainy, hyperactive, overloaded, bitterly absurd — is a ferocious counterattack.

black midi
“Hellfire”
(Rough Trade)