by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
Geordie Greep’s The New Sound might just be the great sonic flex of the decade so far. I mean flex here in the most literal sense, a muscle flexing. An exposure of the raw strength possessed but one wrought with tension veins popping, skin stretching. Every aspect of the glistening visage also portrays the painstaking lengths taken to create this moment, this particular movement. This ripple in the flesh. It's designed to amaze, to catch eyes and ears immediately, to make one impression in about an hour. That impression is that the past no longer matters whatsoever. The Geordie Greep solo album is here.
Such a flex is necessary. The post-band solo outing is one of the most high-pressure debuts outside of the hot-as-shit hype band, it's often either diluted, overblown, or in the best case subdued. The New Sound is neither the former nor the latter but in all the best ways it is overblown. During his time as lead guitarist and singer in Black Midi, Greep helped lead a band whose initially impressive noise rock opuses led the way to some of the most sharply unique prog in years that balanced experimental maximalism with an oddly catchy accessible streak. At their best, the band’s Frippian guitar would collide with cool seductive bass and near impossibly slick yet complex drum grooves to create a sound that recalled the prog greats of old but slimmer, faster, odder in some ways, but in other ways fresher. Their disillusion makes for great dissection, in their solo careers as they occur we can see what each member added to the band.
With Greep, it is in part the prog but it's more than that, it's the Steely Dan-esque jazz rock sleaze, it’s the samba rhythms but more than anything else it’s the desire to make pop, a very particular type of pop. Big grand capital G grandiose pop. Pop in the style of Scott 3 and 4 by Scott Walker, Il n’y a plus rien by Leo Ferre, and Hot Buttered Soul by Marvin Gaye. Shame, fear, and simplicity have been pushed not to one side but off a cliff and maximalism reigns supreme. Now unburdened by the structure of the band and free to play, maestro Greep has pushed everything beyond the extreme. The result is perhaps even more impressive than anything from his time in Black Midi.
For as confident as it is though The New Sound is an album about failure and desperation. Greep himself summarizes its various speakers as not ‘an unreliable narrator but someone who is kidding themselves that they have everything under control, but they don’t.’ This mixture of control and disorder is embedded in the album's sound. The tracks flow effortlessly as pieces of smooth proggy jazz rock up until something underneath the surface bubbles through. On opener ‘Blues’ a liquid smooth guitar line silks its way around Greep’s crooner vocals until it switches into a tense series of minimal notes as the drums slip out of their groove into manic soloing and Greep loses his sing-song tone in favor of a series of screeching commands. The smooth crooner transformed into a screeching preacher commanding and disciplining the listener with terrifying ferocity. The track dances around this tension, alternating between slick riffing and manic grandiosity to create a sensation that even at its calmest moments there's a tension underlying everything.
This is how The New Sound navigates its twin axes of smooth jazz fusion rocking and manic prog, via these sudden disruptions. Some tracks carry them more than others such as ‘Walk Up’ where a slinking yacht rock verse erupts into a series of dramatic guitar and drum blows before eventually erupting into a monstrous noisy groove. Other tracks embrace melody such as the deliciously flamboyant ‘Terra’ and ‘Through a War’ where some of the Greep's most gruesome lyrics with images of ‘foetuses abandoned’ and ‘a woman giving birth to a goat’ are contrasted by distinctly South American tinges. The title track hones in on these slices of samba, flamenco, bossa nova, and MPB, its position as an instrumental allowing it to act as a cipher for the album's sonics. It is in itself the new sound, a mix of Greep’s already known preclusions towards prog and jazz fusion but this is no cocktail nation release. These sounds are pursued with an authenticity that gives the album, despite its often melodramatic heights, a sincerity to its showmanship.
This is very much a showman's album. Greep, now in full band leader form has gathered an eclectic array of musicians who vary from track to track between regular collaborators like Seth ‘Shank’ Evans and Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson to new faces including a group of session players from Sau Paulo Brazil. Greep himself appears across these tracks more of a figurehead than ever. His lyrics are brilliant in both their poeticism and lunacy creating an album where lines like ‘Soon your balls self-castrate’ and ‘I bet your pussy is holy too’ can coexist with a description as gorgeously oblique ‘Like a talented pestilence/She unzips the air/Blinding light emerges/Pink, dark, iridescent sludge/Everywhere’. This contrast is heard in Greep’s voice as well, his vocals landing somewhere between the schmaltzy smoothness of Donald Fagen and the screeching mania of Pere Ubu’s David Thomas. It gives the record a tension reminiscent of Berlin-era Nick Cave, where the post-modern jazz singer facade could fade at any moment into mania, and mania it does, Greep doesn’t merely sing but hiss, breathes, moan, and screech. These additions of speech that interrupt the Sinatra façade add a creaking discomfort, Greep’s voice mirroring the narrators in how despite their apparent confidence something is coming loose underneath the floorboards.
The New Sound is at its best when operating between these extremes of confidence and failure. Opener ‘Blues’ is an easy highlight with its ever-amping structure, gruesome lyrics, and raging big band climax. Similarly the Seth Evans sang ‘Motorbike’ builds and builds with the speed of a runaway train towards a brutally heavy climax that recalls trilogy era Swans with its repetitive riffs and chanting vocals. Even ‘Magician’ a track that gained a cult reputation back during Greep’s Black Midi days has been amplified to these extremes. Its grandiose theatricality hits Broadway musical levels until it unfurls into a ragged cacophony of symphonic guitar riffs, haunting synths, and rabid drums. Perhaps the very best of these ballads of failure is ‘As if Waltz’ where an alternating structure of sleazy disco verses and trad pop choruses burst apart at the screech of a distorted guitar solo, the two disparate styles uniting to create a melancholic background to the solos rhapsodizing that sounds like judgment day occurring on the seventies dance floor.
It's glorious stuff, a series of miniature epics that flow with a classic rock breeziness. While the distortion and brutality of his Black Midi days is for the most part gone, The New Sound might be the most assured record Greep has created since the band's debut. It manages to merge the comedic sleaze of its narrators with a tone that aches with passion. The complexities in its creation and the songs are far more under the hood than in his previous work. Instead, this is an album where melody and character flourish above all else. Every moment of it appears designed to impress, with maybe the exception of the occasional skits, but even those serve to loosen the nuts and bolts ever so slightly because despite its poppier tone this album is very tightly wound. Yet never too tight to feel like its masking some lack of clear confidence. Unlike the narrators of these songs, when Greep seems to say that he has everything under control as a manic solo eases out into waltzing balladry you're very much inclined to believe him.