Midwife : No Depression in Heaven
I first discovered Midwife on the brilliant collaborative record In / Heaven. It featured two tracks, each a gargantuan 15-minute piece, each a collaboration between two artists; Midwife, alongside Amulets, handled the latter of those two pieces. That record, and the discovery of Midwife in particular, became a haunting cloud for me, reminiscent of the first time I heard Grouper or loveliescrushing or This Mortal Coil, like chasing a ghost of goth music that seemed to be disintegrating like an ancient moth-eaten shawl. The pursuit of this mystery led me to learn that Midwife was not the only project of Madeline Johnston. Over the years, her explorations of these skeletal domains, like the snow-covered leafless branches of trees in long miserable hibernation, has emerged under the names Sister Grotto and Mercury Tracer, as well as on a collaborative record with Vyva Melinkolya. On the tin, this record is presented as her fourth full-length, but it isn’t even the fourth full-length under the Midwife name; there are years of practice and refinement lurking, half-transparent, below the surface.
Which explains the laser-targeted emotional devastation captured here. I remarked to a friend recently that, despite listening to a great deal of doom metal and the like, none of it actually feels as emotionally destructive and utterly barren as key moments in country music, shoegaze, dream pop or the like. (Johnston, herself, equates heaviness to “the cathartic release of emotion that you feel in your heart.”) Real music emerging from real immeasurable sorrow, like A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie or Ghosteen by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, tends ironically toward the ethereal and deeply beautiful. There is a natural fragility to real pain, the great paradox of its being, at once a great impenetrable stone and an infinite lattice draped gentle over everything. The songs on this record are all tremendously simple, by and large lacking rhythm sections, most of them just guitar and synthesizer and vocals nestled together. This is trickery; a keen ear plucks out, wait, that’s a second guitar layered over top, is that a third guitar playing the melody? It sounds like there are two synths playing here, those vocals are layered. There is a depth to the production here, a real deliberateness which dispels the notion of this being an accidentally successful bedroom pop project. It’s an old trick, one which for this album seems most rooted in Smashing Pumpkins at their very best, layering dozens of sheets of sound together like puzzle pieces so a delicately crafted immensely complex song sounds simple and heavenly. This is not music of ego; the real work of these pieces hides itself to foreground that haunting thing instead.
This profoundly penetrating sensibility of Heaven is a relief for me. Quietly, I’ve felt her previous two records attributed solely to Midwife, Luminol and Forever, didn’t live up to the richly emotional vein of that initial collaborative album through which I first heard her. They were good, but often left me instead reaching for a record by Grouper or The Cure or The Antlers or any number of other well-known emotionally devastating groups. (Low and Songs:Ohia are reserved for special occasions.) No Depression however feels like a thrilling (if that’s the right word for music like this) synthesis of Johnston’s more meditative work under the Mercury Tracer name and the richly atmospheric work she has made under Sister Grotto. The pieces here hover in length between the extremes of each other those other projects, eschewing the longform exploratory approach as much as the micro-song elliptical melodies she has made for things approaching typical song lengths.
Things are slower now though, sweeter too. Earlier records by her, both under the Midwife name and others, would deploy a guitar tone perhaps most associated with doom metal or the particular type of shoegazing that groups like Planning for Burial, a collaborator of hers, might deploy. Here, however, the sparseness of the sound palette feels closer to Low in their earlier days, letting the gentility feel like the eerie near-featureless white porcelain of old figurines, the scent of your grandmother’s now-empty bedroom, the hollow feeling after the theatricality of pain. Is it the auto-romanticism of misery? Yes, but sometimes misery is romantic.
Label: The Flenser
Year: 2024
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