Soon Your Veins Will Transport Trains: Geordie Greep's "The New Sound"
One-act rock opera par excellence
To start off, we need to understand why I'm so excited about this album.
In an era where most major rock festivals don't even bother to feature acts from the past 20(!) years, very few artists in the genre have the ability to present a genuinely new vision of music - at least without wads of corporate cash in their pockets. British avant-garde trio Black Midi was once a breath of fresh air in this stifling atmosphere, putting out three perplexing albums (plus some cool non-album singles) in their 2017-2024 run and scoring major publicity with multiple world tours. Apple Music's succinct review of their sophomore album Cavalcade (2021) describes it as "chang[ing] shape and sound at every available turn," and accordingly, it sounds just like the grotesquely purple abstract painting that adorns the cover, mixing the virtuosity and intelligence of '70s prog with the surrealist, anything-goes, "yes, and" attitude of Gen Z humor.
That is, until:
After frontman Geordie Greep announced the band's breakup with an infamous typo over an Instagram "vibestream" in August 2024, he quickly began the rollout of his solo album The New Sound. which was released October 4th, over two years after the last official Black Midi release.
As the primary songwriter of the band, his music is pretty similar to Black Midi's output, but replacing the band's whiplash eclecticism with a more focused energy. He leans into a Frank Zappa or Steely Dan-type yacht-prog sound, with a cooler, more refined, and decidedly '70s energy. It's quite impressive that he keeps the same vibe sounding fresh throughout the whole album - in Black Midi's discography, his songwriting seemed to jump between styles every couple minutes, from prog metal ("Chondromalacia Patella") to delicate, flowery ballads ("Marlene Dietrich") to theater-kid flamboyance (Hellfire's title track), but here he has a much clearer vision of what he wants his music to sound like. In a few interviews, he's mentioned that most of the album was self-produced, which is impressive - it's certainly professional-quality, smooth around the edges yet strong when it has to be. His voice is the same nasal sneer as ever, though he's got more dynamic range now, from muttering to anguished screams.
Now we should get to the meat of the album - the central narrative that spans almost all the lyrics. The more concentrated sound here also translates into the lyrics: while Black Midi's songs were often entire stories unto themselves ("Ascending Forth," "Dangerous Liaisons," the personal favorite "Western"), here the story is an album-spanning tale of a desperate man destined for a tragic, one-sided love with a sex worker. It's like a rock opera, but one of those fucked-up, avant-garde operas from the 1920s, like Wozzeck or something.
We begin our tale with "Blues," a standout track that delivers a complex portrait of our protagonist years before the story's events. By the looks of it, he's a gawky adolescent type who thinks he's cooler and more sophisticated than he really is. Despite its title, the song isn't a blues form - instead, it's a shambling monster propelled forward by the precise rhythms of former Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson. In the second half, Greep's unique vocal talents are given center stage as he delivers a rapid-fire, aggressive monologue to the would-be Napoleon: "Soon your heart will burst out free / And soon it will look you in the face and ask, what have you done? Why have you led it astray…?"
"Terra" and "Holy, Holy" show the same character as an adult. Greep has said most of the songs on here were inspired by real-life people he's met while out drinking, and it shows. "Holy, Holy," the lead single of the album, is of special note. On the surface, it's satirically sung from the perspective of a gross womanizer who says weird shit to a sex worker at a bar. Yet if you read into the lyrics, this antihero-type becomes more pathetic than scary - despite his creepy posturing, all he actually wants is for her to "look at me as if I'm attractive," and the whole song climaxes on the line "I want you to put your hand on my knee." How insecure!
Consider the music video. Greep is going bowling, and every shot starts out as a miss, but is sloppily edited into a strike. This clearly represents the protagonist's delusions of grandeur. The dim lighting doesn’t do his appearance any favors either, turning him into a sweaty pink monster.
Moving further into the album, the instrumental title track is a short breather before we get to "Walk Up," a song that originated as a very different-sounding tune Black Midi played live a few times as "Lumps." Here, more time has passed: the antihero now has a corporate job, but still goes to his favorite sex worker for "love on his lunch break." The unhealthy obsession that fills the later songs is starting to take hold. Greep narrates a tense moment as he passes her on the street while he's with his coworkers, praying she doesn't recognize him. The songwriter is no stranger to this kind of material - “The Defence” from Black Midi’s Hellfire similarly deals with pimps and sex workers, though it’s more playful and has less emotional weight.
The song ends with a non-sequitur country skit by the deep-voiced Seth Evans, a London session-man who worked closely with Greep on the album and played keyboards for Black Midi at live shows. (He was actually supposed to get equal billing when the album was first conceptualized, but ended up only contributing one song, "Motorbike," which we'll get to in a moment.)
Next, "Through a War" puts the antihero in the role of a metaphorical dictator controlling a major city, authorizing a manhunt to find his missing lover. The politics are an afterthought, however, and as in "Holy, Holy," his wealth and capacity for physical violence are merely a facade for a pathetic, lonely interior. In perhaps the most upsetting moment on the entire album, he tearfully thanks her for giving him an "incurable disease," saying it'll help him remember her forever.
After interlude "Bongo Season," we get to the final trio of three heavy-hitters, "Motorbike," "As If Waltz," and "The Magician." These songs detail the antihero's spiral into madness as his life falls apart around him. In "Motorbike," sung by Seth Evans, he abandons his one-time lover, riding out of town on a souped-up, neon-yellow midlife-crisis-mobile (again with the material possessions masking interior desires!). But then in "As If Waltz" (perplexingly in 4/4), he wants her back again, desperate for a real relationship where they do romantic couple stuff (exchanging books, meeting each other's parents, etc) instead of their transactional, impersonal one-hour sessions. By the end of the song, he's left truly alone, realizing he's "no different from all the rest" of her clientele.
Finally, we get to 12-minute epic "The Magician," a song with a storied history. Greep played a significantly shorter, unfinished version with Black Midi in September 2022, and it became a fan favorite, growing in length as new lyrics were added every show. Now, over two years later, we can finally hear it in studio form. Put in context as the conclusion of a story, it depicts the antihero's realization of what an awful person he's become. He can finally see what a fool he made of himself pining after a ridiculous image of a "lover who didn't exist." This isn't exactly groundbreaking territory narratively, but the way it's treated and the sheer emotion of the delivery makes it feel like the end of the world. In several interviews, Greep has expressed a desire to make more genuine music, saying that too much contemporary popular music is afraid to put its whole heart out there. I don't know about that last part, but this definitely feels genuine.
The album closes on a sentimental note with "If You Are But A Dream," a cover of a Frank Sinatra song from the '40s. Taken out of context eighty years late, it seems to apologize for the madness of the other songs, as the antihero mellows out a bit and acknowledges calmly that he can't keep living in a fantasy world, no matter how much he wants to.
Overall, this thing is an emotional rollercoaster, and I already want more. It's a seriously complex, layered album that shows a much more mature and thoughtful Greep, and I still feel like I haven't really gotten to the bottom of it all - more re-listens are definitely needed to understand everything. Still, this is a groundbreaking album, and I hope it's not too early to call it a future classic. Greep has said he plans to release another album in 2025, and I look forward to that, as well as whatever the other former Black Midi members, Cameron Picton and Morgan Simpson, end up putting out.
I didn’t intend to write three articles in a row about albums of unreliable narrators and emotionally unstable characters, but I can’t help feeling like it was meant to be. Rest assured next article will be something with a little less ennui.
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