​Schlagenheim

In January, KEXP uploaded a 26-minute video of four British kids positioned in a homey Icelandic hostel, stepping loosely and methodically through a handful of songs that now appear on black midi’s debut album, Schlagenheim. Two things are immediately apparent while watching: Everyone in black midi looks approximately 8 years old and their drummer is an absolute legend. The performance is hypnotic, hair-raising, maybe a little irritating, and definitely out of time—a bunch of schoolboys producing something so staunchly learned, freeform, and anti-pop in an age when pop reigns supreme.

Before black midi had even announced their album, the video was passed around like samizdat by people who watch drum tutorials online; older dudes who long for the days when prog bands like King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer ruled British rock; weirder sects who love the chaotic grooves of no wave bands like DNA or Mars; younger fans who glommed onto the post-punk sound of Preoccupations or Girl Band; guys who own Butthole Surfers records and sometimes play a Fantômas song when no one’s looking. The 323,000 views for this video comprise an underclass of music nerds who worship all things mathy, noisy, wiry, and aberrant. By the end, when we see guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin put his cell phone up to his guitar pickups and play a recording of a woman ranting ad nauseam, black midi have shown themselves a band so full of glorious potential (and pretension), the only thing people were left wondering was: What do they sound like in an actual studio? If the KEXP performance was the grabby cold open, six months later, Schlagenheim is the first act of a band that teeters on brilliance—a restless, nerve-wracking high wire act that could easily fall off at any moment.

Schlagenheim offers prime counter-programming for our current rich, harmonic, verse-chorus-verse era of indie music. With a froggy-voiced singer and an armful of guitar pedals, black midi sprint in the opposite direction. They are a band for whom references become the main talking point—a chilling thought for anyone who prefers not to think about music through the lens of dudes prattling on about other dudes in older bands. All the indie rock tropes of old are summoned: exclusion, referentiality, insularity, recalling a time in the ’80s and ’90s when the underground just covered each other all the time.

Forget about trying to reach out with a poppy lead single, black midi don’t seem to be trying to reach anyone at all. It’s ego and oddity reclassified as a human stand against the computable nature of pop in the streaming age—prog as proof of life. Or maybe they’re just young and operating without any stakes. Whatever the case, it’s black midi’s ability to write songs that screw in deep and rewire the synapses that make Schlagenheim come alive and burst apart. They play passionately and unselfconsciously, drawing upon their youth, imagination, and what sounds like hours upon hours in a practice room.

Above all, black midi swings. They are an interlocking unit, yet have a recklessness of someone who likes to close their eyes and take their hands off the wheel. This is best captured by the opener, “953,” where you are introduced to drummer Morgan Simpson’s tender and indestructible relationship to the downbeat. You are also introduced to singer Geordie Greep’s divisive, dynamic voice: Imagine someone with the name “Geordie Greep” and that’s essentially who he sounds like (or, Mark E. Smith if he were a Bond villain). Together, with bassist Cameron Picton and guitarist Kwasniewski-Kelvin, black midi shrink and grow, speed up, slow down, get loud, get quiet, find a groove, destroy the groove, find a better groove, and then move on. This music is dense and well-composed, propelled by the adolescent impulses of a band eager to never be bored again.

Part of Schlagenheim’s wonder comes from just how unformed it is. At their best, black midi sound like the first days of Earth: atonal, unstable, a land mass roaring to life before the laws of harmony or rhythm are in place. The thrill of listening to a short burst of gibberish-core on a song like “Years Ago” makes you wonder if they know literally everything or literally nothing about how songs work. On “Western,” they trot through different sections of an eight-minute suite, as Greep channels his inner Lewis Carrol (“a pink caterpillar with six anorexic children”) along his journey to the fictional town of Schlagenheim. At all times, their fellowship of chaos is moored to Simpson’s drumming—shadowy, melodic, crucial to the success of every moment on the album. It is Simpson who elevates these songs from heady improv experiments to a new, exciting language of music.

Though Greep’s subject matter and eccentric delivery are a little too affected, there are a few lyrics that pop out amid all the abstract brain doodles. Picton sings a more straightforward lead on “Near DT, MI,” which alludes to the ongoing Flint water crisis in Michigan: When his voice tears apart the words “dead in the water,” it’s the closest black midi come to evoking righteous anger, or any real ideology or emotion you could put a name to. More to their squirrelly nature is “bmbmbm,” a song made up of one note and one circular thought. Greep sings, “She moves with a purpose/What a magnificent purpose/And they find different ways to suck themselves off, but she does not care at all…” with increasing intensity as if trying to win an argument with a mirror.

It feels like “bmbmbm” is the band’s anthem, not simply because it’s self-involved or because it’s the best song on Schlagenheim or because they’ve been closing their much-lauded live shows with it, but because it’s a blank slate onto which black midi project their truest selves. Greep plays with the lyrics like a cat toying with a dead mouse, really enunciating “suck” as if he’s realizing all the contours of his lips and teeth and throat in real time. The band keeps a no-wave stomp going, with Simpson interrupting occasionally with precision fills that frustrate the rhythm but never lets it fall out of time. It is primordial and juvenile, dumb and clever, arch and true, and captures a band at that rare time before any self-conscious tones creep into their music. All the while, black midi discover what has been pioneered by countless bands before, and still present it as something entirely new.

Buy: Rough Trade

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