black midi with Circuit des Yeux, Bell’s Eccentric Cafe & Beer Garden, Kalamazoo Michigan, June 30, 2023.

The sludgy, spasmodic riffs of black midi’s opener “953” had crashed to a definitive, screeching halt. The hundreds-strong audience stood happily stunned at the young British quartet’s feral, frenetic onslaught. Cue an Amtrak train passing directly behind the stage, hailing the north side of Kalamazoo with its overblown, howling whistle, right in rhythm. It made perfect sense that guitarist/second vocalist Cameron Picton stepped immediately to the mike and yelled at the top of his lungs, “I [EXPLETIVE] LOVE TRAINS!!!!” just before the band kicked into the taut build of “Speedway.”

black midi’s music sounded like that all night — an unstoppable series of planned accidents that formed weirdly compelling shapes as they unspooled. Sculpting order into chaos, drummer Morgan Simpson’s groove and chops never faltered, no matter how many unpredictable stops and starts in a given song; guest bassist Seth Evans locked down apparently arbitrary pulses with imperturbable style. Guitarists Picton and Gordie Greep bounced off these lopsided foundations in furiously random directions, especially on the highlights from bm’s Hellfire album — ominously creepy funk slamming into a death-metal polka on “Welcome to Hell”, superspeed jazz-fusion counterpoint melting into lounge-lizard ambience on “Sugar/Tzu”, quietly floating chords ramping up to accelerating sheets of thrashy noise on “Dangerous Liaisons”. These guys know their rock history — teasing the Beatles’ “Taxman” before kicking into “27 Questions”, morphing from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” riff into their unreleased “Lumps” — but they obviously feel bound by none of it when they jam and compose. Which seemed to be a giant part of their appeal to the remarkably youthful crowd; had they ever heard anything quite like this? (A middle-aged geezer like me definitely hadn’t; these guys made The Mars Volta sound normal.)

The words were every bit as riveting and disorienting as the music, too — vignette after vignette of hapless characters stumbling into unanticipated nightmares, bringing on personal apocalypse with their clueless responses. Think Frank Zappa, only even more sarcastic! Picton’s dry vocal intensity was frequently deployed to more serious intent, pulling in the crowd on the countrified “Still”, the grinding military march “Eat Men Eat” and the yowling protest song about the Flint water crisis “Near DT, MI”. In contrast, Greep reveled in mockery and malice, pinning his victims to the wall with gleeful lightspeed rapping (“Sugar/Tzu”) wobbly crooning (“27 Questions”) and punked-up snarls (the breathless political allegory “John L”) — all delivered in a nearly impenetrable, gotta-be-fake accent that reminded me of no one so much as Bronson Pinchot on the 1990s sitcom Perfect Strangers. (“Don’t be ridiculous,” indeed.)

All of which sounds kinda nihilistic, if you think about it — a world stripped of pretension and hope, skewered and sent up to a soundtrack that echoes the sheer bedlam black midi see and hear all about them. But I sensed a weird sort of nourishment at work in their music, and I think I saw it in the catharsis happening for the audience, especially at the end of the night. The stage lights came down, Simpson decelerated to keep time on the cymbals, Evans switched to sparse, jazzy piano, and Greep suddenly swapped out his court jester persona for the achingly surreal lullaby “The Magician”. “When the smoke clears, what’s left?” he sang over and over. Was it a peek at the hearts beating behind bm’s snarky facade? Maybe, maybe not; but either way he sent us home purged: freshly exposed to the raw absurdity, hypocrisy and anguish around and inside us and mightily exhausted after an evening of pogoing all over our mutual problems — in off-kilter time signatures, no less.

Setlist:

• 953
• Speedway
• Welcome to Hell
• Sugar/Tzu
• Taxman/27 Questions
• Dangerous Liaisons
• Enter Sandman/Lumps
• Still
• Eat Men Eat
• Dethroned
• Slow
• Near DT, MI
• John L
• The Magician

— Rick Krueger