Welcome to Hell

Black midi's third album opened with this track, and it announces a new phase in their evolution with something approaching theatrical relish. The arrangement has a vaudeville undercurrent — piano figures that would sound at home in a smoky cabaret, brass that seems to wink even when it should menace — but these elements are stretched and distorted into something far stranger than their constituent parts suggest. The rhythm is lurching and self-interrupting, stopping and restarting with the comic timing of a performer who knows exactly how uncomfortable the silence is. Greep's vocal performance here is among his most extreme: theatrical in the most literal sense, adopting characters and tonal registers mid-phrase, moving between crooning and something close to hysteria without warning. The lyrics sketch a kind of inverted welcome, an ironic ceremony of initiation into suffering, delivered with such showmanship that the darkness becomes difficult to locate beneath the entertainment. This is the sensation of watching a clown who is genuinely dangerous — you laugh because the alternative is more frightening. The production is precise and almost brutal in its clarity, every instrument present and accounted for. It rewards headphones at high volume, late at night, when you are in the mood to be unsettled in a way that feels like pleasure.