The latest Midriff release is called The End of the New Country, and is attributed to a duo calling themselves Get Help. Get Help is a collaboration between Beatings guitarist and vocalist Tony Skalicky and New York musician Mike Ingenthron, who began writing songs together as a break from writing ad jingles. If Midriff has a GZA, it seems to be Skalicky, who has a very clear idea of what he wants his music to sound like and sticks to the plan like a pro.
What this means on vinyl (or in bits or scattered photons) is that like many other Midriff releases, Get Help drenches well-written songs and strong melodies in layers of fuzzy guitar and feedback which gradually build and ebb between enormous climaxes and quiet moments, a sound that is definitely, undeniably, refreshingly adult - not at all for little kids, and not at all like jingles.
Ok. I will admit, even without a kid in the picture this kind of stuff is like catnip to me. I can’t deny it. Give me some reverb, some layers of distorted guitars, and a slightly downcast lyric and I’ll go for it like a sucker. But – and this is important – at the end of the day, the songs need to be good. Without a great song, pretty sounds are just pretty, and the bloom quickly comes off the rose. That’s the story of dozens, if not hundreds, of albums that have crossed my path in the last two decades, and you probably haven’t heard of any of them.
Luckily, at least half of the songs on The End of the New Country (due out October 14) are very good indeed, with Skalicky’s brittle baritone voice (which resembles a cross between Ian Thomas of Joy Division, British folk icon Richard Thompson, and Jimmy Buffett) and Ingenthron’s lighter voice cutting through the sumptuous bed of dissonance and soaring overtones that is one of the Midriff label’s trademark sounds. The musical DNA is Sonic Youth, Morphine, and My Bloody Valentine, but Skalicky and Ingenthron manage to invoke the sounds of their influences without becoming a thin imitation of them. (Does the fact that all the comparisons I can draw with Get Help are a decade or more old say something about them, or about me?)
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