CAVALCADE

Black Midi's second album is one of the finest releases in the prog-rock niche for the year of 2021, it is a bit strange to say this because is kinda hard to classify it as a prog-rock album because of the HUGE amount of influences that this album has, which makes sense since their description on this site is as an "experimental post-punk avant jazz math rock band", whatever this long sentence means.

All the influences cited earlier can be perceived in this album but this is not what surprises because is because anyone can just imitate the greater ones and consider themselves good for this, what is awesome about this band is the way they put this all together and creates something very unique that could be easily identified as "black midi style". This is accomplished mainly because of the great talent that all musicians show here not only as technician players but as songwriters.

Talking about the general feeling of the album is sort of an "organized generalized chaos", you have what you would expect of a math-rock record, weird tempos and dissonant instruments but they never let the music became "too avant-garde" to the point that turns to be hard to appreciate, these same strange sounds are packed together in a cool post-punk vibe that maintains the listener involved.

The instrumental is awesome and not a single note seems out of place. There are various parts where the album is raided by jazzist saxophones, drums, and bass which adds a nice variation to the album,

Variations it's one of the words that can be most used to describe this album because it constantly shows how versatile this band is and how is musicians know the importance of this to create a good record, in summary, the songs can be break into two types, the more "Chaotic experimental" and the "Calm and ethereal" ones (this is an oversimplification, but is useful). There are 2 songs I could say are the most "math-rockey" and experimental which are Chondromalacia Patella and Dethroned, 3 songs which are more "ethereal" and psychedelic but still have their break to gain a lot of energy (Marlene Dietrich, Slow, Ascending Forth) and the rest of the album kinda mix this two styles but always surprising the listener in the way that this is incorporated.

As I said before this is one of the best albums of the year (maybe THE best) and show us the enormous talent that these guys have (especially because they are only in their 20s), not only I think this is a great start from a fresh new band but that they have the clear potential to deliver us one of the "Essential" records of the site. The band not only quotes the references but works toward becoming one.