Review Summary: "After a first few listens, everything becomes accessible when you’ve become more accustomed to it." - Morgan Simpson of Black Midi, 2022
"Welcome to Hell" is an oddly apt lead single for Hellfire. The song opens up with an annoying four-note pattern with an arrangement that tips its hat a bit too deeply to the Smashing Pumpkins, before the guitarist remembers he possesses a middle finger and injects a post-punk'y tritone into the mix. It feels irritating and academic (tritones in a song with hell in the name, get it?), like some sort of lofty meta-commentary on the redundancy of musical content between genres. Yet it gets under your skin and you catch yourself coming back to it again and again, digesting its various short phrases, growing to appreciate an immaculately crafted song. The four-note pattern gets mutated in various ways, from densely orchestrated dissonance clusters to a banging hard rock interlude, keeping its simple chromatic ascent and open string root note intact. This is counterbalanced by similarly warped takes on a grotesquely cheery alternate motif, always appearing at just the right times. Eventually the initial annoyances start feeling a little playful in context.
The only songs properly free from the love/hate dynamic of initial repulsion becoming eventual appreciation are "Sugar/Tzu" and "The Defence". The former just works out of the box. The rallying ringside intro giving way to an extremely gentle jazz section is a subversion of expectation that actually works, and then having the assembled band trying to make its way through a sixteenth note metallic romp without any tonal changes is oddly brilliant. Brief recurring tension stabs eventually pave the way to a bittersweet interlude, aided by a single haunting sax note held just long enough to make the segue stick the landing. The piano does a ton of lifting, from atmospheric Rhodes arpeggios to massive chords filling in similar spaces to big rhythm guitars. All of this somehow draped in an ethereal mist, not contorting the listener too much. Brilliant stuff all around. By contrast, "The Defence" is the album's weak point and never elicits much of a reaction as there's not a lot to get the listener going. The song arriving after the tonally related yet far more accomplished "Dangerous Liaisons" ends up sounding like a washed up show in a third-rate Vegas club.
Every other song on here is initially grating in one way or another. The title track is very tedious and held back by its overexcited vocals, but it ends up setting up orchestral expectations and basic continuity motifs. "Eat Men Eat" gets slaughtered by some overt overblown horns at the end, but its marriage of world music influences, oddball groove in the rhythm section and absurd acoustic guitar chord shapes make for one of the album's more memorable moments. "Still" feels like a country knock-off of "Slow" due to blatant lap steel use, similar syncopation and airy vocals, but actually sports a more fun, carefree instrumental until it gets clobbered by a dissonance drive-by and tries to crawl to safety, passing out from blood loss into an ambient fog. "Dangerous Liaisons" suffers for the crimes of another song, but is ultimately a rhythmically and harmonically entertaining track that actually earns the few bars of insanity it ends with. "27 Questions" brings back torturous memories of the intro, but breaks them up with a silly accordion squawk and a moving showtune interlude hitting up the titular queries. It ends up an odd complement to "Sugar/Tzu" with some minimal, understated melodic work floating over a tense background ripe with harsh, discordant figures. One of my favourite moments is a brief extreme register piano earworm that departs as quickly as it appears.
The most difficult to parse track is the longest one. The intro to "The Race is About to Begin" sets the expectations sky high, promising a song like no other, only to get greeted by self-plagiarism of the chromatic idea from "Welcome to Hell" descending into a wall of nonsense. The song is the single biggest culprit in the intake of the album as a whole, as the erratic hops destroy any ability to perceive dynamic flow going forward. The overextended wall of noise section in the middle is the band flying too close to the sun, with the lacking vocal delivery sounding like double speed playback of Caleb Followill trying to be David Byrne over indecipherable high-intensity skronk. The listener is left on edge, expecting the insanity to return at any moment and cheapening all the soft material that comes afterward. It takes a full seven minutes until "Dangerous Liaisons" does a brief intense outro, but the senses have been overwhelmed and look for confirmation, jumping at the chance when given one. "The Race is About to Begin" is ultimately a well composed song, nodding to various other tracks and its own elements. My current favourite callback is a drunken jazzy sway reappearing as a quiet piano shimmer once the acoustic guitars come out in the outro. There is no denying it is excessive though.
While Hellfire is inferior to Cavalcade, it's good that Black Midi chose to build upon their prior explorations rather than try to rehash the formula. Immediacy is replaced with annoyance, perhaps as a heavy-handed artistic decision. Hell is not supposed to be fun, after all. Things feel somewhat more abstract, there's little room for conventional hooks or instrumental prowess, everything is in service of the overall sound. There could be less out of control horns as the gimmick gets old pretty quickly. It's all solidly written though. Hellfire is the definition of a grower, and Black Midi reaffirm their status as one of the most exciting bands to keep an eye on going forward.
