Geordie Greep – The New Sound
What do you get when you give a musical maverick free rein, gather thirty-session musicians across two continents, and decide that anything goes? The answer is “The New Sound,” the solo debut of Geordie Greep, former frontman of the experimental rock band Black Midi. And what a debut it is: this is an album so astonishingly idiosyncratic that you need to listen to it three times just to grasp it.
Greep, liberated from the (relative) constraints of his former band, dives headfirst into a whirlwind of styles that is both ridiculous and brilliant at the same time. It’s as if Frank Zappa and Frank Sinatra decided to create a Broadway musical together, directed by Scott Walker, all under the watchful eye of a feverishly smiling Greep.
The backstory of the album reads like a fever dream: half of the tracks were recorded in Brazil, with local musicians who had never heard of Greep being recruited on the spot. ‘They were just interested in the demos,’ he says nonchalantly as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to round up world-class musicians for a two-day session in South America.
The title track is a jazz-funk workout that could have come straight from the opening credits of a trendy Netflix series. Brass players dance around each other, wah-wah pedals wail, and somewhere in that orchestrated chaos is a bassline that ties it all together. It’s theatre in musical form, and Greep is the master of ceremonies who has all the strings in his hands – or does he?
Because that’s exactly what “The New Sound” is about: people who think they have everything under control but do not. The characters in Greep’s songs experience wild fantasies that inevitably end in fiasco. We are taken to cafés, bars, rented rooms, and strange museums, where his protagonists engage in military role-playing and socio-economic victory fantasies.
Take, for example, the single “Holy Holy,” an urban romantic fantasy set in a nightclub. The track combines indie chords from the 2000s with grand Latin big band arrangements, including an assault of three pianos at once. It’s absurd, but it works wonderfully.
The stories Greep tells are as bizarre as they are captivating. Where else can you find an album that packages cannibalism, being cooked alive, and a woman giving birth to a goat into one coherent narrative? It’s art that leaves you astonished, confronting you with the unexpected and forcing you to reassess your expectations of what music can be.
Greep’s plans are just as eccentric as his music. He wants to do ‘a Keith Jarrett thing’: using different session musicians in different places each time, embracing that no performance will ever be the same. With Greep at the helm, it would also be absurd to expect anything less.
“The New Sound” is an album that defies all conventions, a record so refreshingly different that it has to stand out in today’s music landscape. It’s a work of art that you don’t just hear but also feel, see, and taste. An explosion of creativity that restores confidence in the future of alternative music. A bold, intelligent, and above all, highly entertaining debut that tramples all boundaries of genre and convention. (9/10)
