Menu

Madeline Johnston

a3383296562_16

Midwife, “No Depression In Heaven” (The Flenser, 2024)

, ,

Madeline Johnston’s fourth solo album as Midwife borrows its title from The Carter Family’s timeless and transcendent classic about leaving one’s worldly cares behind.  The title presumably has some aspirational meaning, as the darker side of life is an eternal theme for Midwife, but it is also a nod to both Johnston’s life on the highway as a traveling musician (with a dying tour van) and to the many other road warriors that came before her.  In keeping with that “road album” theme, Johnston also name-checks “outlaws” and “the psyche of America’s underbelly” as big influences and notes that most of the album was written almost entirely from the back of tour vans.  That claim rings true, as this entire album feels unusually intimate, nocturnal, and stripped down and most songs are centered upon little more than Johnston’s voice and a few simple chords or arpeggios.  In fact, almost every song on No Depression could literally be played on an unamplified electric guitar in the back of a van.  Impressively, that stark minimalism suits these songs extremely well, as there are enough great lines and killer hooks here to make it clear that Johnston does not need much more than six strings and her voice to craft a memorable and emotionally heavy song.  This is the Midwife vision distilled to its absolute essence.

Last year, I read Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life and there was a small bit in it about wanting to write a song called “Rock n Roll For President” that made me wince.  I bring that up because No Depression’s opening song is entitled “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” and Johnston manages to miraculously sing lines like “if rock n roll is a dream, please don’t wake me” or “rock n roll will never die” without sounding irony-poisoned or ridiculous.  As it turns out, execution is everything, as some people (Jason Molina, for example) can sing practically anything and make it sound profound and Johnston is blessed with that same gift herself.  Consequently, “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” is a minor masterpiece of slow-burning magic and reads like a hissing, hypnagogic, and endearingly sincere love poem to the power and beauty of music.  Yet another impressive feat is the stark simplicity of the music, as Johnston nicely embodies the old line about the essence of country music being “three chords and the truth.”  

In this case, there are actually four chords, but each one only gets a single strum in the descending progression and Johnston enhances them with little more than a bit of delay.  There is also a submerged sea of howling and moaning guitar noise buried in the mix, as well as a cool slide guitar crescendo, but the song would still sound amazing with just an unaccompanied acoustic guitar.  The rest of the album is essentially six more melancholy, monochromatic variations on that same template, but it works every single goddamn time because Johnston’s performances are so honest, direct, and intense.  The lyrics may change and Johnston may arpeggiate some chords, but the songcraft is invariably brilliant and the themes all tend to hit pretty hard (even the song about her tour van feels like a devastating break-up song).

To my ears, the two stone-cold instant classics on No Depression are “Droving” and the album’s lead single “Killdozer.”  For the most part, the hushed beauty of “Droving” is not dramatically different from that of several other killer songs on the album, but the melodic hooks are unusually wonderful and there are a bunch of them.  Also, the guitar part is absolutely sublime, as Johnston manages to make the sound of her fingers sliding around the fretboard sound legitimately beautiful.  

Weirdly, the bittersweet “Killdozer” did not strike me as a uniquely brilliant Midwife song when it was initially released, but several of the lines have sneakily burrowed deep into my psyche since (“all my songs are love songs, all my songs are blue”).  Also, Johnston’s nostalgic lament for a town made unrecognizable by gentrification (“ghosts even don’t try to haunt me”) cut even deeper once I learned that it was partially inspired by the bulldozer rampage/suicide of Colorado muffler shop owner Marvin Heemeyer.  

Notably, that is one of many “easter eggs” strewn throughout No Depression, such as the lick from Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” buried in “Droving” or the fact that the title track seems to be just a single decontextualized word from a Roy Orbison song repeated and harmonized to mantric perfection.  I’m sure I will find several other amusing or poignant allusions in the coming months and I am similarly certain that some of Johnston’s other lines will eventually reveal themselves as devastatingly poetic once I hear them enough.  This album legitimately blindsided me (albeit in appropriately slow-motion), as I genuinely did not expect such a stripped-down album of rock n roll-themed road songs to rival early Midwife classics like the Prayer Hands EP.  I now stand corrected.  No Depression In Heaven is an absolutely mesmerizing album.

Listen here.

a1938563710_16

Midwife, “Forever” (The Flenser, 2020)

, ,

It is fair to say that every Midwife release is a deeply personal one, as Madeline Johnston has never been one to mask her true feelings with ambiguously poetic language or aesthetic distance. This second full-length is an especially heavy one though, as it was composed as a sort of letter to Johnston’s late friend Colin Ward (the two were roommates at Denver’s beloved former DIY art space Rhinoceropolis). Fortunately, cathartically transforming dark emotions into powerful art has always been where Johnston shines the brightest and that remains as true as ever with Forever. 

In fact, she has arguably only gotten better, as Forever‘s lead single “Anyone Can Play Guitar” actually gave me chills the first time I heard it. Thankfully, the other five songs do not pack quite as much of an emotional gut punch, making this album considerably more well-suited for repeat listening than, say, Mount Eerie’s similarly inspired (and emotionally devastating) A Crow Looked at Me. There is certainly plenty of pain and anger to be found on Forever, but that darkness is beautifully mingled with warmth, hopefulness, and a characteristically unerring instinct for great songcraft.

Given how this year is shaping up thus far, the sentiment of the opening “2018” unintentionally feels even more apt for the present, as the lyrical content boils down to just “This is really happening to me” and “Get the fuck away from me, 2018.” For Johnston and many other Denver artists, however, that year will always be remembered as the year of Ward’s untimely passing, which was arguably the culminating event for quite a demoralizing couple of years (Denver shut down Rhinoceropolis in 2016 in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire). 

Despite the justifiably hostile lyrics, however, “2018” is an eerily lovely piece, as the repeating lyrics are warmly hiss-soaked and feel almost like a mantra. And, of course, the underlying music is quite beautiful as well, unfolding as an understated, slow-motion dreamscape of chiming arpeggios and reverberating slashes of distorted chords. By comparison, the more driving and hook-filled “Anyone Can Play Guitar” feels like a bittersweet breakthrough to a much later stage of grief, as Johnston notes that anyone can tell a lie, fall in love, or say goodbye, then breaks into a simultaneously haunting and defiant chorus of “You can’t run for your whole life.” 

That said, the chorus later transforms into the much darker sentiment of “I’m not coming back this time.” As dark as it is, however, “Anyone Can Play Guitar” is an absolutely mesmerizing pop song that is equal parts seething, mysterious, and gorgeous. Johnston is a master at making a few simple lines feel increasingly fraught with deeper meaning as they repeat again and again in shifting order. Similarly, she has a real instinct for vocal effects and harmonies, masterfully using distortion and hiss to actually increase the sense of intimacy and rawness. Throughout the entire album, Johnston’s confessional-sounding vocals consistently find the perfect blurry middle ground between sharp-edged and sensuously breathy.

The following instrumental (“Vow”) briefly dials down the simmering intensity of the album, as it is essentially just a quietly lovely progression of chords allowed to linger until they decay into near-silence. Notably, however, that interlude acts as a bridge between the album’s two distinct halves, as the remaining songs are considerably brighter in tone. The first of that trio (“Language”) is a warmly tender elegy that almost feels like a love song. It also features the first real splash of color on the album, as Johnston enhances her characteristic slow-motion arpeggios with a squirming, shivering, and shimmering motif that sounds like a swirl of backwards guitars. 

After that, the album gives way to a second divergent interlude: this time, a poignant spoken word recording by Ward himself entitled “C.R.F.W.” I am a little surprised that Johnston did not make that the final piece on the album, as both the voice of Ward himself and the moving final line would have made a perfect and poetic ending for the album (and it dissolves into a quite a heavenly wake of quavering drones as well). 

The ending that Johnston chose instead is quite strong too though, as she stomps her distortion pedal and launches into a fuzzed-out gem of shoegaze-y pop bliss (“S.W.I.M.”). In fact, that may even be a more perfect ending, as its comparatively muscular, bright, and hopeful tone suggests that Johnston emerged from that dark stretch unbroken and even stronger than before. Moreover, it is the piece where Midwife most sounds like a full band, showing that the collaborative community spirit of Rhinoceropolis lives on through Johnston and her quartet of guest musicians (Tucker Theodore, Randall Taylor, Jensen Keller & Caden Marches).

If Forever was an album by almost any other artist, I would probably be disappointed that there are only four fully formed songs, but one aspect of Johnston’s artistry that I genuinely love is her singular talent for distillation. It is not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of Forever‘s lyrics could easily fit on a (very small) napkin, but that beautifully illustrates the minimalist genius of Johnston’s approach to both language and songcraft. While every song on Forever seems like it was created solely to convey one single important thought or feeling, the full meaning of Johnston’s words is left teasingly elusive through fragmented repetition until a crucial phrase is finally allowed to complete at the song’s end. And the song truly does end at that point, as there is no point in lingering around once the message has been delivered. Every single word is chosen for maximum impact and anything that could shift focus away from that impact has been mercilessly carved away. And on a larger scale, the cumulative arc of these six pieces was clearly designed to pack an undiluted & album-sized emotional punch (and it succeeds) .

In fact, I am tempted to compare Forever to a perfectly cut diamond, but that is exactly the wrong metaphor, as the beauty of Midwife is that Johnston’s songs feel wonderfully raw, direct, and deeply human rather than polished or overwrought: these are great songs and this is great art. Admittedly, it is hard to say if this album quite tops the absolutely stellar Prayer Hands EP (we may have a tie), but it is very easy to say with complete confidence that Midwife has had an unbroken hot streak since the moment the project debuted. While I know it is only April right now, Forever is unquestionably one of the most focused and powerful albums that anyone will release this year.

Samples can be found here.

a1573946883_16

Midwife, “Prayer Hands” EP (Antiquated Future, 2018)

, ,

Recorded during the turbulent period following the closure of beloved Denver DIY space Rhinoceropolis, Prayer Hands takes the hazy, melancholy dream-pop beauty of Like Author, Like Daughter and distills it into a gut-punch of simmering and seething emotion. While the swooning, elegantly blurred pop of “Angel” is probably the release’s biggest hook, Madeline Johnston and collaborator Tucker Theodore gamely expand the Midwife aesthetic in some more visceral and experimental directions as well. The result is a near-perfect release that features three gorgeously haunting gems of hissing and hypnagogic shoegaze heaven in a row.

The EP opens with the brief title piece, a dreamily warm and bittersweet web of rippling arpeggios that fades away after a couple minutes. While it ostensibly ends as a scratchy and unintentionally poetic answering machine message signals the start of the slow-burning “Forever,” the two pieces feel like they segue together to deliciously prolong the gathering storm that finally breaks open when Johnston starts singing. While her vocals are characteristically melodic, tender, and languorously sensuous, they are doubled in quite a compelling and unique way. If I had to guess, I would say that the second layer of vocals are likely emerging from Theodore, but they are processed in such a way that they feel snarling and inhumanly infernal, lying somewhere between a rasping and demonic death metal howl and a strangled squall of white noise that seems to be supernaturally shaping itself into an approximation of a human voice. It is a wonderfully striking illusion.

More than anyone else, Johnston seemed to have learned something crucial from Grouper, but found a way to do something new with it. While Johnston’s vocals admittedly share Liz Harris’s penchant for hazy reverb, the vocals on “Forever” do not sound like they are emerging from a fog so much as they sound like an unnerving interdimensional duet with a static demon. Few genres benefit from an infusion of visceral, otherworldly snarl more than dream-pop and shoegaze, as the tendency is to smother songs in too many effects or fall into the trap of thinking that the effects themselves are a song. With “Forever,” Johnston and Theodore strike the perfect balance between slow-motion, soft-focus beauty and an undercurrent of screaming chaos. The vocal effects here simultaneously create a fog and viscerally tear through it.

Johnston’s spectral double returns again for the more straightforwardly pretty “Angel,” albeit in noticeably muted form, as her lilting vocal melody merely swirls through a haze of crackle and hiss. As with “Forever,” it is an absolutely lovely song, but it is a much more benign one—it feels like a break-up song that is more of a tender reminiscence than a raw wound (and nothing supernatural seems to be trying to claw its way out of my speakers). In particular, Johnston and Theodore do an especially stellar job at fleshing the piece out with subtle layers of depth and color, gradually evolving from gauzy, shimmering guitar noise into a lovely coda that transforms the piece into a charming bit of sun-dappled backporch psychedelia (all the distortion falls away to leave only a lilting slide guitar melody, a strummed acoustic guitar, and a slow pulse of swelling reversed chords).

Naturally, a piece entitled “Angel” has to be followed by a counterbalancing piece entitled “Demon,” leading Prayer Hands into its droning, experimental and wonderfully hallucinatory final act. “Demon” slowly fades in on a wave of tape hiss that sounds like waves cresting on a beach, but moaning layers of unintelligible backwards vocals gradually start to converge into a slow pulse. Soon after, that surreal tape loop miasma starts to shape itself into soaring and whooshing vocal flourishes and the guitar and drums finally kick in, dragging the spacey, undulating soundscape into a woozily beautiful instrumental swirling with buried melodies and intertwining, serpentine solos. In essence, it is a total psych-rock freak-out, Midwife-style: a glacial unfolding feast of seething layers and masterfully controlled, slow-building tension that never fully boils over.

With Prayer Hands, Midwife has officially entered the exclusive pantheon of Artists Who Have Floored Me Twice, as Madeline Johnston retains everything that was wonderful about her debut, but eliminates absolutely everything that diluted the cathartic power at the project’s core. There is much to love here, as Johnston intuitively and organically stretches and reshapes conventional song structures to serve her slow-motion beauty perfectly and even the darkest stretches are alive with passion and melody. Moreover, she has crafted a moving elegy for an entire community (as well as an unintended one for a close friend) that feels like a transcendently great, soulful, and vibrantly alive dream-pop album.

That is no small feat. In fact, Prayer Hands favorably reminds me of a half-remembered Charles Bukowski quote about why he was bored by Albert Camus: he preferred writers who screamed when they burned (existentially, not literally). Though I am sure that I totally mangled the quote, the sentiment has stuck with me for decades, as the world is full of art that buries its raw emotional core in mannered artifice. Midwife definitely does not fall into that trap, as Johnston’s vision is a volcano swathed in dreamlike fog. This is everything I could possibly want in an EP: great songs, heartfelt intensity, depth, and plenty of unconventional ideas executed masterfully. Prayer Hands is easily one of my favorite releases of 2018.

Samples can be found here.