By Sam Z
“If Rock and Roll’s a dream, please don’t wake me,” Midwife sang on “Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” the opening track to her new album “No Depression in Heaven.” For the duration of her September 8 album release show at the Bluebird theater, the dream was vivid and devastating, the clearest representation of Midwife’s self-defined “heaven metal” genre. Midwife, one of a handful of monikers used by Denver-based maestro and founder of the “heaven metal” genre Madeline Johnston, celebrated the release of their 4th album at this show. The album, released on San Francisco label The Flenser, is titled after a song from the Carter Family, one of the first acts to record country music and still a big influence on all things Americana.
Openers Polly Urethane and DBUK set their own distinct tones for the show, like two sides of Midwife’s own originations.
Polly Urethane began with two Frank Ocean covers, reshaping the songs into otherworldly ambient dirges anchored by her striking, resonant voice. Her set then took a sharp turn into harsh, industrial pop, where her commanding stage presence took over. It was hard to look away from Polly Urethane’s set, with Amber’s raw emotion demanding the audience’s attention.
DBUK traipsed onstage next, armed with all manner of folk instruments; including an autoharp, bowed banjo, sleigh bells, and some tin-can drums. DBUK is a quieter and more introspective act from three members of Denver legends Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and like the older band but in a different way, their set felt like a return to the middle-of-nowhere mountain town that Denver once was. DBUK’s Americana blues felt rooted in tradition but also devastatingly modern. A song like their closer “The Red Cross Is Giving Out Misinformation” harkens to the best of John Prine, but with a distinct Denver flavor.
DBUK’s folk parallels not only the title of Midwife’s newest record, taken from a Carter Family song, but also her record’s lyrical content. Themes of trying to find peace in a rapidly changing, unfamiliar world pulsed through both acts’ lyrics. Polly Urethane’s ambience and restless experimentation shared duality with Midwife, and both acts touch on catharsis through performance, on finding acceptance in pain through expression of that pain. Although disparate acts in tone and musicality, DBUK and Polly Urethane set up Midwife’s complex, surreal performance perfectly.
Johnston began her set by thanking her crew and audience, and announced she wouldn’t be talking during the set. And she didn’t, presenting the entirety of her new record as a whole. Songs bled into one another through drones and loops. By the end of “Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” her first song, the entire audience seemed to be dreaming. And what a dream she creates, wrapping us in gauzy, reverb-soaked guitars and delicate vocals. Curt Heiner’s live 16mm projections provided visuals, casting images that sometimes directly related to song lyrics and sometimes were more impressionistic; like a grainy reversed footage of smoke and flames during the title track that guided the audience further into Johnston’s surreal, gloomy world.
Johnston’s sound brings to mind hypnotic dream-pop artists like Julee Cruise, but filtered through lo-fi telephone microphones and minimal, reverb-heavy guitarwork. During this show, she was accompanied by her electric guitar, an assemblage of guitar pedals (including her own The Magic Circle pedal, a collaboration with Denver-based pedal company Fowl Sounds), and a lone synthesizer, which she used once during “Better Off Alone,” the album’s penultimate track.
When Johnston sang, it was understated in its raw, minimalist emotion. Songs like “Droving” are crushing in their simplicity with lyrics like, “the pain is easy when it’s all you know.” Blunt honesty defines these pieces. Later in the same song, Johnston sang, “every dog has its day / run like hell” with a palpable lethargy; lyrics that wouldn’t feel out of place against the harsh sonic tapestries of fellow Flenser labelmates Have A Nice Life or Chat Pile. Here, they are completely recontextualized, given new weight and palpability in Johnston’s despondent delivery. In a cover of Rowland S. Howard’s Autoluminescent, Johnston sang “I’m bigger than Jesus Christ / higher than God in light / I am dangerous / I cut like the sharpest knife.” These grand statements didn’t feel celebratory. They stung like fresh wounds.
Later in Midwife’s set, the song Killdozer took Marvin Heemeyer’s modified bulldozer spree through Granby, and contextualized it in a rapidly gentrifying Denver (read our interview with Madeline on this song and the record here). We were guided through a lost, ruined city, as images of backward, reversed RTD buses were displayed on surrounding screens.
The final song of Midwife’s set, the title track and closer of “No Depression in Heaven,” plays like the thoughts of a mind in between wake and sleep. There, words fail. In swirls of looped guitars, Johnston was reduced to repeating “Crying / Ha Ha Ha Ha.” We were left with our own crying, ha ha ha.
Eventually, we wake. The house lights turn up and Carter Family’s “No Depression In Heaven” plays as the audience files out. As A.P. Carter sings of how he is going to heaven, we are left with the dream we’ve just woke from and the world we’ve awoken to. Now, Midwife’s self-described “heaven metal” has taken on a new meaning. In playing her heaven metal, Johnston creates a small piece of her own “heaven” on earth, cathartic and healing. In the heaven Madeline creates, there is no depression.
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