We blurb with a magnificent purpose…

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Tim de Reuse: I somehow missed the huge amount of hype these guys have generated, even though on paper they’re the kind of thing I might never shut up about: you got your Post-Punk, your No Wave, your clattering drums, your divisive vocalist, your confrontationally asymmetric album cover — hey, sign me the hell up! Oh, but I haven’t been let down this hard in a good while. Geordie Greep’s vocals are an easy first target; on “Ducter,” in particular, he sounds less like a vocalist with an idiosyncratic style and more like he’s putting on a goofy accent. But more fundamental problems exist beyond Greep’s affectations: it’s all so dreadfully clinical! It’s the unflinching minor-key tension and the vaguely bleak lyricism, void of levity or self-awareness or even a single structural surprise. The antiseptic production saps all energy from what might have been cathartic, noisy climaxes. Even when they’re trying to fire on all cylinders, though, their devotion to showing off their technical chops trumps their willingness to really cut loose. It’s too prickly and cerebral to get comfortable with but too self-serious and straight-laced to overwhelm — on a line between math-rock dexterity and punkish aggression, stranded in vacillatio.
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Alfred Soto: Flummoxed by the historical weight of their record collections, critics of Black Midi’s debut haven’t published reviews so much as works cited pages. The latest hypes are no less comfortable with noise than Tortoise, and the vocals gobble-gobble like Reagan-era Pere Ubu — that’s all I’ll proffer. “Ducter isn’t more “difficult” than other performances by acts besotted with going from I to A while foregoing B. 
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Hannah Jocelyn: Things that didn’t make it into my PopMatters review of Schlagenheim: It’s algorithmically generated for people that claim they don’t like how Algorithms Have Ruined Music Consumption. It’s Alt-J for the Dark Prog era. As such I will defend Dan Carey’s production – a Dave Fridmann psychedelic type type would have made the whole album unlistenable, if possibly even more appealing to those types of listeners. Carey doesn’t prevent this song from going overboard at the end, but he allows the performances to just exist as they are, even as the recording undersells Morgan Simpson as a drummer. It certainly helps that this song has some of the best lyrics on the record, in that it has discernible lyrics, though I imagine most will be put off by That Voice. The whole record is complicated to properly assess, but songs like this suggest that greatness is in their reach.
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Katherine St Asaph: The Pitchfork review for Schlagenheim describes Black Midi as such: “They are a band for whom references become the main talking point–a chilling thought for anyone who prefers not to think about music through the lens of dudes prattling on about other dudes in older bands. All the indie rock tropes of old are summoned: exclusion, referentiality, insularity, recalling a time in the ’80s and ’90s when the underground just covered each other all the time.” This sounds like my absolute worst nightmare, so I was surprised to not hate “Ducter,” nor find it all that inaccessible. The main guitar is its own sort of hook, propelling the track forward and anchoring it to 4/4 much like the percussion anchors “Full of Fire” by The Knife. The tempo and register shifts remind me of a couple Throwing Muses songs, maybe “Speed and Sleep.” And the vocal, while obnoxious, isn’t obnoxious in the way of most indie dudes who audibly don’t value or give a fuck about singing, but in the way of a clearly trained vocalist who knows and executes the exact sound he wants, even if that sound is Tommy Wiseau psyching himself up to cover Diamanda Galás. (I’ve deliberately chosen reference musicians who aren’t dudes, prattling or otherwise. Everyone complains about women musicians only being compared to other women; Black Midi are a prime example of a band of men compared [by everyone] only to men, in a way that should be glaring.) I do wonder whether the oft-touted “difficulty” of the band will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Iris Xie: I really like songs with grooves that end and rebuild and are constantly transforming, they just feel so organic and with a sense of breathing. “Ducter” is a very pleasant song to listen to, even if on the surface to an uninitiated listener, it’s “out there” with the jazziness and then the noise rock. The vocals are really playful, impassioned, and punctuate between the instruments with a well-targeted sensibility, and they wrap up together into a cohesive piece. The transition at 3:49, when it suddenly drops down to a single guitar and what sounds like space commands, before it goes suddenly full-tilt into power mode, is especially fun and buoyant in its energy. 
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I’d argue that Black Midi’s debut shows signs of greatness without being particularly great itself, but it’s no surprise that publications are eating it up given few rock bands this decade have such a rich pedigree. Personally, their music primarily recalls ’90s post-hardcore bands while the singer is brazenly obnoxious (and consequently admirable, usually) a la Pere Ubu, The Monks, and Sun City Girls. “Ducter” doesn’t quite convince me of its runtime, but the austere, syncopated freak outs are mildly thrilling. I would’ve preferred a more cacophonous racket.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’m a lover of kinetic, mathy guitars, but “Ducter” gets better when it strays from its core riff. Maybe it’s a matter of simplification– the guitar pattern threatens to envelop the overly wordy lyrics on the verse, but as both drill down to their core theses on the refrain, they start to work in harmony. It never quite gels together– but I’m not sure if unity is the goal, anyway.
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