Every fresh album that drops into your rotation is a latent proof of mortality. It’s not much evidence of anything now, but just give it a decade, or five years, or one. Bit rot and vinyl warps will erode songs’ aural integrity. A copyright lawsuit is probably snaking like a lightning bolt through the paperwork, and before you know it, your favorite beat’s uncleared sample has been struck down till 2049. The passage of time will ossify today’s hottest, most up-to-date sounds into relics in the rearview mirror. You will feel old.
The gist I got listening to Matt Jencik & Midwife’s collaborative album Never Die—out now via Relapse records—is the horror that “blog music” might just qualify as retro now. Lo-fi projects passed over by the major publications and lavished with praise by anons on music forums. Never Die just turned a week old. Have a Nice Life’s Deathconsciousness, with which Never Die shares its gauzy, distorted droning and ceaseless preoccupation with life’s impermanence, turns 17 in January.
The heft of this nostalgia doesn’t come off as a coincidence. It crops up everywhere in the lyrics and the plaintive, distorted guitar work. The three music videos leading up to the album’s release are all filmed in dark, grainy footage, with long tracking shots of treelines, owls, and near-empty amusement parks keeping their rainbow lights on at night.
Some background: Jencik, formerly a member of Implodes and a touring member of Slint, made a dark ambient record begging that those close to him, those with whom he’s forged his core memories, will be immortal. His home recordings slipped through the cracks with another collaborator and lingered in the basement, its sounds recessing further into the past.
But enlisting the guitar of longtime friend Madeline Johnston, whose work as Midwife is so spectral she herself calls it “heaven metal,” suggests a weary resignation. Jencik hasn’t succeeded, won’t ever succeed, in keeping everyone alive. If his output’s scuffled, perhaps Midwife, fresh off 2023’s collaborative Orbweaving and 2024’s solo No Depression in Heaven, holds the antidote.
You’d never guess how pretty Never Die is from the album cover, the song titles, or the gloomy souls making it. It averages the output of Jencik and Johnston into a musical limbo, hypnotic yet sober-minded, stuck in the old days yet bracing for the future.
Layering warm, hushed vocal harmonies over Jencik’s dirging drones, which in his solo work waver in frozen terror, Midwife is a calming presence throughout Matt’s anguish. “The metalheads were right, only death is real,” Johnston whispers close to the microphone, on the matter-of-factly named “Only Death is Real.” She repeats these lines over swirling, vapory synth pads, smoothing a memento mori into a lullaby that might hook you up with death’s little cousin. Reassuring and a tad tongue-in-cheek, Midwife puts the “soothe” in “soothsayer.”
The textures get a bit too soft in the album’s middle stretch, to the point where they blanket like a thick fog over the chain of nightmarish imagery. Inherently mortal records like PAN’s compilation Mono no Aware and the darker material of Grouper and Tim Hecker, all of which this album strongly evoke, prick their own ethereal soundscapes with little blips of uncertainty, as if the high you’re on to blunt the pain will go south at any second. But on Never Die the emotional payoff, the righteous anger, often gets lost in the murk.
Granted, you could do much worse for an alarm than the alien sax solo on the bridge of “September Goths.” And the small jingle bells at the end, in homage to a “December boy” who’s “got it so bad,” add a sweet flourish to a perfect night drive candidate.
There are genuine peaks of rage and desperation in the music, bundled alongside the record’s most cryptic lyrics or most fascinatingly awkward vocal deliveries. Like the trippy “Flower Dragon,” with walls of heavy, distorted guitar chords redolent of late-period Low. “The Last Night” shovels six feet of dirt on the lovelorn country slow-dances of Orville Peck’s Pony. Jencik’s monotone spoken word is less theater kid, more one of Slint’s antisocial antiheroes skulking along the perimeter of the Halloween function.
He dusts off his dull delivery on the bridge of closer “Rickety Ride,” which contains both the least convincing and most genuine utterance of “don’t do it” I’ve heard in some time. He sounds like the artist’s friend doing the voiceovers for a slanted, desolate YouTube animation. Of course it didn’t keep her, the barista he picked up at an amusement park, there with him.
How this record ought to sound instead of how it does is a puzzle Matt Jencik and Midwife tease at but opt not to resolve. What should death sound like, in a digital world where keystrokes flatten affect? What should grief sound like; what’s the sound of staving off death; what’s the sound of failing at that? If your answer is “2008,” you’re as wrong and as right as everyone else.
Buy or listen to the album here.
