043: Midwife - Killdozer
Madeline Johnston has spent the best part of the past decade weaving together a truly engaging catalogue of experimental sound; their work as Midwife offering one of the most shadowy and quietly gripping landscapes this side of Grouper.
Announced last week, for an early September release, No Depression In Hell is the fourth full-length solo album from Midwife, written in the back of vans over the past few years and then recorded at home in New Mexico over a couple more.
While the often-derided "life on tour" album has faded from wider use over the past few years, if anyone is going to bring a fresh (but still world-weary) gaze to that strange and monotonous world then you imagine Johnston would make the very best of it.
No Depression In Heaven explores themes of sentimentality, the interplay between dreams, memory, and fantasy, and a familiar subject seen throughout all of Midwife’s work: grief. Madeline Johnston takes a look at the tender and transcendent underneath a hard exterior of leather and studs, exposing a different side of the heavy music scene, where Johnston’s project has been living and evolving.
Lead single 'Killdozer' is aptly sombre, Midwife's totemic slab of guitars an ever-present concrete underlay for Johnston's hypnotic voice to roll along, inch by laborious inch. The result is, as always, something both splintered but oddly beautiful; a flower through a crack in the pavement, a faded billboard lost to the elements.
I want open water
I want something new
I want something real
I live my life without you
~
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