Forever is the new album by Midwife, the project of Denver based multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston (also of Sister Grotto & mariposa). Released almost three years after the project’s debut album, Like Author, Like Daughter, and its first on The Flenser, Forever sees Johnston continue to forge a path into a genre she describes as “heaven metal.”
As we wrote in our review of Like Author, Like Daughter, Johnston developed the Midwife project during a residency at Rhinoceropolis, a Denver venue/co-op that was closed in 2016 during a period of high tensions around the safety of DIY spaces following Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire. Residents like Johnston found themselves evicted and forced to disperse across Denver to start over. But despite being closed as a physical space, the spirit of Rhinoceropolis lived on, not least in the friendships and creative partnerships that were forged there.
One such relationship was between Johnston and her Rhinoceropolis roommate Colin Ward. “He was my roommate and was the embodiment of that place in a lot of ways,” Johnston describes. “I was always learning so much from him, about life and being an artist. He was an amazing teacher and friend to me.” Sadly, Ward passed away in 2018, and Johnston turned to music to try to capture the ensuing, otherwise indescribable feelings.
Forever is the result, a six song record that the label describe as “a latticework of soft focus guitars and precise melodies—anthems of light piercing through gray clouds of drone.” Opening track ‘2018’ approaches the loss that formed the album’s context head on. “This is really happening to me,” Johnston sings, the track’s ethereal drift like the weightless descent of delayed grief. “Get the fuck away from me 2018.”
Single ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ is an attempt to square the enormity of grief against its thousand banal components. Johnston’s declarations—anyone can play guitar, fall in love, say goodbye—could be read as warnings, as self-deprecation, as fatalism in the aftermath of the loss. Maybe the sheer commonality of death makes a joke of us, or perhaps the shared nature of grief elevates us to a higher purpose.
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But the confrontation of ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ cannot be maintained. The plaintive instrumental ‘Vow’ follows, like the jarring second slap of mourning that arrives later and always in solitude, a creeping, sinking finality that’s been waiting for the guard to drop. Anger and disbelief exhausted, the focus switches to memorial. ‘Language’ comprises of just one line, the first half of which is repeated across the four minute run-time. “How do I say this in every language?” Johnston asks, before following with the second half, delivered just once but with sledgehammer poignancy, “I will never forget you.”
The first half of ‘C.R.F.W’ is a poem read by Ward himself, capturing mortality in the image of a leaf falling away from a tree during autumn, a verse that is incredibly moving even without the prior context (the piece, which can be found in Junk Jet n°5, is experimental in form and presentation, so this is an approximation of the structure according to our display limitations):
d e a t h i s n o t v i o l e n t
if you ask the leaf on the tree in autumn if it is scared to fall off the branch, it will say,
‘i have given all I am to this tree, am tired, and i’ll float on down now’
imagine the way a breeze feels against your leaf body
while you finally don’t have to hold on anymore.
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There’s a moment once these final words are delivered, the briefest pause of silence. When Midwife’s haunting tones reemerge, they do so as an extension of this. Non-silence as silence, sound as movement and light. The sensation continues into the fuzzed-out shimmer of finale ‘S.W.I.M’, and somehow works retroactively back through the preceding songs too. The record is not Colin Ward remembered but transfigured, absorbed into some greater energy, some bigger thing. Lost, but only to those left behind. “I wanted to write him a letter,” Johnston says, “I wanted to make something for him in his memory.” But Forever feels more like a letter from him to us. Hang on in there, he seems to be saying. Hang on until it is time to let go.
Forever is out now on The Flenser and you can get it via their webstore or the Midwife Bandcamp page.
Photo by Alana Wool