(Rough Trade)
Smoothing out the jump-cut chaos of his previous band, Cameron Picton brings entirely acoustic instrumentation to bear on these lovely, beguiling songs
I
n the middle of Hellfire, the final album by British art-rockers Black Midi, lurked a song called Still. It was easy to overlook. As you may recall, Hellfire was a rock opera that – even by the standards of rock operas, seldom the first place to look for a linear, elevator-pitch-friendly plot – made no sense whatsoever: there was some business about a boxing match, an actor who exploded on stage, and a set of army recruits with names such as Tristan Bongo and Mrs Gonorrhoea. It was admittedly difficult to pay attention to the narrative, distracted as one was by the sound of Black Midi continually doing their nut in their traditionally maximalist style: scrabbly riffs, jagged chords, free-blowing sax, bursts of noise, cocktail jazz interludes, Beefheartian rhythms, bursts of accordion, the sound of the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio etc. Amid all that, what price a sweetly lambent acoustic track, with a little country and a dab of bucolic Canterbury prog in its DNA, sung not by frontman Geordie Greep in one of his apparently fathomless array of funny voices, but by bassist Cameron Picton, a man possessed of an understated, guileless vocal style?
