{"id":521420,"date":"2026-04-09T12:49:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T12:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521420\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T12:49:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T12:49:07","slug":"my-new-band-believe-review-beautiful-ideas-burst-from-ex-black-midi-mans-lovable-debut-album-pop-and-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521420\/","title":{"rendered":"My New Band Believe review \u2013 beautiful ideas burst from ex-Black Midi man\u2019s lovable debut album | Pop and rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the middle of Hellfire, the final album by British art-rockers Black Midi<\/a>, lurked a song called Still. It was easy to overlook. As you may recall, Hellfire was a rock opera that \u2013 even by the standards of rock operas, seldom the first place to look for a linear, elevator-pitch-friendly plot \u2013 made no sense whatsoever: there was some business about a boxing match, an actor who exploded on stage, and a set of army recruits with names such as Tristan Bongo and Mrs Gonorrhoea. It was admittedly difficult to pay attention to the narrative, distracted as one was by the sound of Black Midi continually doing their nut in their traditionally maximalist style: scrabbly riffs, jagged chords, free-blowing sax, bursts of noise, cocktail jazz interludes, Beefheartian rhythms, bursts of accordion, the sound of the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio etc. Amid all that, what price a sweetly lambent acoustic track, with a little country and a dab of bucolic Canterbury prog in its DNA, sung not by frontman Geordie Greep in one of his apparently fathomless array of funny voices, but by bassist Cameron Picton, a man possessed of an understated, guileless vocal style?<\/p>\n

Cover art for My New Band Believe. Photograph: Rough Trade Records<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to think of Still when considering Picton\u2019s first post-Black Midi album as My New Band Believe, recorded with a host of left-field and improv-friendly musicians, among them veteran drummer Steve Noble, once of skronky 80s post-punk hellraisers Rip Rig + Panic. While Greep\u2019s 2024 solo debut The New Sound offered the full sonic smorgasbord familiar to Black Midi fans \u2013 all the sudden leaps from samba to heavy riffing and Zappa-ish jazz-rock your heart might desire \u2013 My New Band Believe\u2019s eponymous debut could be read as an album that takes Still as its starting point.<\/p>\n

Its sound is entirely acoustic, the live-sounding recordings of fingerpicked guitar, double bass, piano and percussion augmented by string arrangements. Its lyrics largely abandon the flights of fancy that characterised his old band\u2019s oeuvre in favour of a more direct approach. There\u2019s definitely a hint of Black Midi\u2019s penchant for the grotesque in the revenge fantasy of opener Target Practice \u2013 \u201cIf we see you on a spike with holes for your eyes \/ we\u2019ll just keep practising our aim\u201d \u2013 but more often they alight on more prosaic topics. Love Story conjures up an apparently earnest vision of lost domestic contentment \u2013 a now-split couple humming along to the radio while cooking dinner, conjured with the aid of sound effects \u2013 while Opposite Teacher ruminates on fatherhood.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Even so, from the moment that the arrangement turns dissonant on second track In the Blink of an Eye, you\u2019re reminded that understated is very much a relative term. If My New Band Believe take a more subtle tack \u2013 and seem noticeably more concerned with melodies \u2013 than Black Midi, they still deal in songs that are episodic and strange.<\/p>\n

It feels telling that Picton initially approached Van Dyke Parks<\/a> to orchestrate them, even if the co-author of the Beach Boys\u2019 legendary Smile proved sadly out of his price range: if My New Band Believe is less kaleidoscopic in stylistic range, there\u2019s something of the fidgety restlessness of Parks\u2019s lauded 1967 album Song Cycle in the songs\u2019 unexpected key changes and shifts in mood and pace.<\/p>\n

Over the course of its eight minutes, Heart of Darkness moves between a Pentangle-esque blend of folky guitar and jazzy drums, a kind of breezy acoustic soft rock and a sparse, ominous and seemingly improvised coda of guitar harmonics and a disconcerting sound that could be feedback or strings. Actress is filled with sweet melodies, again in a folk\/jazz vein, but it\u2019s also full of pregnant pauses, tempo changes and surges in volume: it doesn\u2019t so much end as peter out, as if everyone concerned has exhausted themselves in the process of performing it.<\/p>\n

That the album doesn\u2019t exhaust the listener \u2013 as Black Midi were wont to do \u2013 might be due to its constant sense of movement being contained by the instrumentation, and to the smoothness of its continual transitions. The result is an album that feels less distant, less inclined to showboating, easier to love \u2013 rather than merely admire \u2013 than Picton\u2019s previous work, without ever feeling like it\u2019s pandering to the listener. It\u2019s admirably unbound by things such as standardised song structure, feels difficult to accurately pigeonhole and comes teeming with musical ideas from out of the ordinary \u2013 but it feels like it\u2019s wearing its intelligence a little more lightly than its author once did, which might be the smartest move of all.<\/p>\n

This week Alexis listened to<\/p>\n

Beth Orton \u2013 The Ground Above
There\u2019s a sense that Beth Orton is an undervalued artist, precisely because she has never let her quality control dip for thirtysomething years, a point proved by The Ground Above\u2019s racked expansiveness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the middle of Hellfire, the final album by British art-rockers Black Midi, lurked a song called Still.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-521420","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}