Review Summary: Fallen angel of light, fallen leave from a tree, you’ll never be forgotten.
Forever is a curse. Those days filled with laughter and light will sooner or later meet tragedy, and that life that felt so euphorically perfect will turn to ash in a matter of seconds. It will come for each one of us, and we will always be unprepared. For Madeline Johnston, it came in 2018.
“
This is really happening” she repeats in disbelief during the first seconds of “2018”. It is the year her friend and former room mate, Colin Ward, lost his life. He was 27 years old.
Her guitar is cut wide open and bleeds a couple of guitar chords, notes dripping like blood from her soul. Her spectral harmonies try to nurture the wound, but they only help the song to advance stoically, stumbling against the walls of noise like a living dead until it crumbles and fades away. The shoegazy mantle of “Anyone Can Play Guitar” takes over, with Johnston loudly howling over the pulsing distortion. There is so much dread and sadness in Midwife’s music that I can even sense the plants in my room withering behind me.
An interlude splits Johnston’s second full length, just a few spaced notes to cleanse the sour taste of the previous track. “Language” enters the room, like an apparition. Grouper comes to mind, but it’s different, less ethereal, more flesh. From this point onwards, even if you have chosen to stay impartial to Johnston’s ceremonial grief, it is already too late. Ward’s voice recites a poem of his own, some words stick in my mind, and I have the feeling they will stay there for a long time, swinging back on sleepless nights, seeking a meaning that will stay unrequited. Several guitars lay a veil over his words, in the style of Noveller, calm and collected, and so “C.R.F.W.” comes to an end. “S.W.I.M.” has the arduous task of closing
Forever, and it fulfils its duty effortlessly, as the track glides over the static storm with callous resolve. It’s in this moment, when the song stops breathing abruptly, that I find myself staring at the wall for a few seconds before realizing the night’s embrace.
If you are familiar with The Flenser’s catalogue, or with the likes of Planning for Burial, you will be mildly prepared for what awaits you in
Forever. It’s a beautiful elegy to a friend, but also a brilliant exercise in sound craft, as everything has been written, performed and recorded by Johnston herself. It’s an album that requires a certain empathy with the artist, not to enjoy it, but to assimilate it and make it yours too, which I hope this stream of words help you find somehow.
