Well, it’s not exactly the “new” sound, now is it? Geordie Greep, for the last three years, has been best known as the frontman for neo-prog post-post-punk freakout merchants Black Midi. Black Midi’s signature was ultra-technical mathy explosions cut through with Greep’s unique vocal style – a little bit of a rant, a little bit of hectic carnival barking, and then bringing it all back into tender off-kilter crooning. Immediately from the beginning of “Blues”, you can be forgiven for mistaking this new solo record from the man as another Black Midi record.

There are, of course, signs that it isn’t. The tropicalia bent to “Terra” would have seemed out of place on, say, Cavalcade – that little squiggly Casio synth would never have flown. It’s cruise ship big band from the next White Star liner to sink tragically in the Atlantic, and it provides an excellent peek into Greep’s head. Similarly, “Holy, Holy” marries big band jazz musical numbers (the underlying references to Shirley Bassey’s “Big Spender” are pretty obvious) to slick, clean Eighties guitar and synth lines, avoiding cheese through frenetic restlessness and sheer force of will.

Elsewhere, Geordie Greep doubles down on the prog tendencies that set Black Midi apart from their contemporaries. “The New Sound” ends up being a heady mixture of Rush and Genesis that, fifty years after The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, sounds fresh as hell. The middle range of the album tends to fall into this pseudo-BM freewheeling hard prog mode – see the squealing sax work on “Motorbike” – culminating in the album’s centerpiece, the 12-minute horror kaleidoscope of “The Magician.”

It’s all a lot to take in at first, gobbets of prog, jazz, and musical theatre all coming at you from every direction. The imagery also probably doesn’t help with the disorientation. The album is peppered with references to prostitution and cuckoldry. On “Through A War” he declaims that courage looks like a woman giving birth to a goat. The middle of “Walk Up” delves into paranoia: “Your fish fingers shake hands with the top flight men/Check your balls for lumps once they’ve left/What’s that itch? Is that new?/Is that working as it’s supposed to?” The uncomfortably bizarre lines “Two mice harakiri in the corner of my room/Their little paunches bleeding, their tails are interlinked/An orchestra plays through the floorboards/It says, “Hello”, as they say, “Goodbye”” begin the jazzed-out “Bongo Season.” That’s not to say that it’s much of a departure from Black Midi lyrics (EAT MEN EAT) but with the extra splash of manic showtune grandeur it’s even more beguiling.

At the end of it all, this is what Black Midi broke up for. You could hear the creative tension throughout their recording tenure, so it’s unsurprising that it happened. What is surprising is that it was clearly Greep against many of the others, since a lot of what is presented on The New Sound could very well have fit under the Black Midi label with some slight adjustments. That’s the entry point – if you liked Black Midi, if you liked Cavalcade especially, you’ll find many things to like about The New Sound. If you couldn’t, this record will do nothing to convince you otherwise. As someone who had Cavalcade on repeat since it came out, there’s a lot to admire here. The whiplash changes, the desperation in Greep’s theatrical voice, the pure outlandish showmanship on display – it’s all guaranteed to keep me up at night for weeks straight.

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