As good, and inventive, as modern rock music gets: Black Midi’s Hellfire reviewed

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Katja Hoyer

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The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them, or because you actually enjoy the music they make? By which I mean when you’ve finished listening to them is it a sense of admiration which lingers in the mind, or are you captivated by one or another of their songs? Previously it has tended to be the former – and there is an awful lot to admire. If you add superlative musicianship to a certain witty and anarchic imagination, you end up with this rather deranged, occasionally irritating, millennial mash-up of styles, where jazz fusion meets post-punk, James Brown, Beefheart, clever prog and pretty much anything else which, however briefly, flits through the consciousness of their auteur, Geordie Greep.