black midi’s new album Hellfire is an absolute bundle of agitated and twisted songs. Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet. It is instantly black midi but adds more elements of Zappa and showtunes.
Whereas the stories of Cavalcade were told in third person, Hellfire is presented in first-person and tells the tales of morally suspect characters. There are direct dramatic monologues, flamboyantly appealing to our degraded sense of right and wrong.
….the nine-track record was written in isolation in London shortly after the release of the band’s…
…second album, Cavalcade, last May. Comparing that record with the new album, black midi’s Geordie Greep said in a statement, “if Cavalcade was a drama, Hellfire is like an epic action film.”
Hellfire is said to tell “the tales of morally suspect characters,” according to a press release, with each story presented with a first-person narrative. “Almost everyone depicted is a kind of scumbag,” Greep said. “Almost everything I write is from a true thing, something I experienced and exaggerated and wrote down. I don’t believe in Hell, but all that old world folly is great for songs, I’ve always loved movies and anything else with a depiction of Hell. Dante’s Inferno. When Homer goes to Hell in The Simpsons. There’s a robot Hell in Futurama. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer who portrays a Satan interfering in people’s lives. There’s loads.” — quietus