black hair noon in a dark world with Hellfire

War, disease, murder, exploitation, sordid, cynicism, callousness. Humanity isn’t exactly human in the songs of Hellfire, the caustic and uplifting third album, a masterpiece from the English band noon black.

Every song on Hellfire is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiomatic decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies, and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any time. The lyrics feature an assortment of fractured narrative strategies featuring largely unsavory characters indulging in deadly sins like lust, greed, hubris, and gluttony. The songs’ protagonists include killers, brutal military commanders, and a performer whose last show is his own death. There are also some dark philosophers, like the lines Geordie Greep spouts in Hellfire, which opens the album: Bad luck/Only luck and rot, inevitable doom.

But the songs do not lament. They bristle.

The members of black midi, all in their early twenties, Greep and Cameron Picton, playing guitar and many other assorted instruments, and tireless drummer Morgan Simpson met at the BRIT School in England, the famous high school of the Performing Arts. From the start, the group displayed their technical mastery and omnivorous listening, and their tastes encompassed prog-rock, post-punk, pop, funk, jazz, contemporary classical music, cabaret, electronic , flamenco, noise and more.

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

Schlagenheim, Black midis 2019’s debut album, while a quartet including guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin, was puristically recorded by the band members alone. But with the album Cavalcade in 2021, and more on Hellfire, black midi has expanded and orchestrated their songs. The contrasts of blitz and delicacy are even greater, as delicately arranged string sections or howling wind and brass appear and disappear at will.

Even in their occasional quiet moments, Hellfire’s songs have breathtaking momentum. This album fully restores the Simpsons’ remarkable drumming, always in the service of the composition: crisp cymbal strikes and surging rolls through the kit, high-speed gunfights and whispering cymbals, catchy fanfare snare, patiently rehearsed funk or Latin rhythms which suddenly explode. This time around, the black midi music often moves so fast that Greep doesn’t care about the melody. Many of his vocals come in spoken, working up to auctioneer hyperspeed in songs like The Race Is About to Begin, which isn’t so much rapped as vomited.

A sardonic, deeply British gallows humor pervades the songs, along with a belief that no storyline or structure is too convoluted. Defense is a smug brothel owner’s rationalization My daughters are destined for hell or our priest says / But find me a Christian who spends so much time on his knees delivered like something like a big band show tune from a vintage Hollywood musical.

In Dangerous Liaisons, a farmhand becomes a hitman who realizes that the employer who is stiffing him is Satan; the music is a jazzy rhythm that goes in and out of waltz time and other much more delicate meters, finally invaded by saxophone and brass before Greep finally barks Futile regret!

As if the songs didn’t provide enough puzzles, black midi previewed the album with a video for welcome to Hell a grating, snappy, rhythm-changing chronicle of hapless soldiers’ shore leave that has viewers deciphering a cryptic graphic alphabet.

With Hellfire, black midi envisions a decadent, collapsed, zero-sum culture, a war of all against all. Clever, hyperactive, overloaded, bitterly absurd music is a fierce counterattack.

noon black
Hellfire
(gross trade)