#calvalcade

These songs sprawl, reverberate, sometimes fugue-like, accumulating their gravity through repetition, with more layers, melodic phrases introduced as tracks proceed, as with “Slow,” the song’s title and steady, metronomic percussive underpinning in sly juxtaposition with its migrating time signature, a play, perhaps on the nature of experience, both inexorable and subjective. Compositions like “Hogwash” begin meditatively and then, just as suddenly, front man Geordie Greep is ranting, raving, these tonal shifts the band’s loose-limbed distillation of verse-chorus-verse structure, once plied so memorably and then with increasing repetitiveness by grunge and successive waves of 90s rock acts and their ubiquitous quiet-loud-quiet dynamics. Indeed, this music is consistently compelling, but sometimes it goes in too many directions, becoming busy, unfocused, and we lose the plot, as in “3,” where the shapeshifting Greep’s mellifluous, velvety, even pillowy vocals restore the song’s footing.

But the album is beautifully sequenced overall. Sometimes the transitions purposefully jar and provoke—elsewhere they’re seamless, prolonging, elongating a motif. “Diamond Stuff” builds patiently, its sotto voce monologue a series of asides, an inner voice amplified, the track gradually lifting off into something plaintive, ethereal, culminating in a seraphic synth wash overlaid by a celestial choir of voices that serenade, waft over us collectively, dissipating into pastoral sounds akin to field recordings, out of which emerges a tonic note, which becomes the yearning sax line that introduces “Dethroned”.  Indeed, it’s spiritual music along the Alice Coltrane continuum, with contemporary echoes in the wildly percolating LA, Chicago, London jazz scenes.

Serene as they can be, these songs never linger too long in one place — they’re restive, and yet there’s a supreme confidence in their progression, fitting given the band name, a reference to the Japanese underground musical genre harnessing myriad permutations of Midi files. This concept of the digitally chimeric is channeled, refined, elegantly, in the refractory nature of Black Midi’s music, and despite Cavalcade’s expansiveness, one might say succinctly, with a more analog, live sensibility. Nothing if not eclectic, the band operates especially in prog rock and jazz idioms, the intricate nature of these tracks — rock gone orchestral — reminiscent of Zappa, both stylistically and technically, the songs at once tightly wound and improvisational, also echoing the cerebral, angular, densely woven aural tapestries of sonically nomadic 90s “math” acts like Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Polvo. And yet, as a friend commented pithily the other day, “not without hooks.”