After spending the last two years teasing the audience with a run of excellent singles, Charlotte, North Carolina indie-electronic artist Midniter now delivers a full album of beguiling songs in Xeno, a title that hints at some of the key themes running through the songs. Although an ancient Greek word, Xeno has become a universal suffix relating to something foreign or alien, a perfect epithet for a suite of songs written from the stranger in a strange land point of view, familiar to many of us as we view the world around us.
‘Midnite Mass’ draws the listener into Nic Pugh’s nighttime world, a blend of scything guitars running through a digital landscape, a brooding array of cinematics and post-apocalyptic atmospheres, of the project’s nocturnal references and the album’s sense of dislocation.
And although the four aforementioned singles are found here – ‘Shoot The Moon’s’ disco strut, ‘Alarmist’s’ soft beats and ambient ripples, ‘Sugar Man’s’ beguiling digital blends and ‘I Could Love You’s’ slow-burn from ephemeral sonics to pulsating euphoric dance – it is always what lies between those more obvious singles that intrigues me most. The sonic story that sits between the musical highlights. The bigger picture and the album’s plot rather than the much vaunted, although justified, action sequences.
‘Daydreamer,’ for example, comes closest to a conventional slice of mainstream synth pop; it is brilliantly textured, digital layers and electronic tones blending into a serene, subtle and seductive soundscape, more substantive than anything the charts would be used to, but certainly a sound that would be readily embraced in such quarters. ‘Gnasche’ is a song as emotionally charged and full of uncontrollable sonic urges as the title hints at, and ‘Thanatonaut is a dark and delicious soundscape referencing the collective wisdom of those who have gone before as a metaphor.
That run of singles might have signposted something extraordinary was on its way, but I would say Xeno outruns any of our expectations. At times the music is dark yet accessible, commercially viable and still eminently cultish, smart and seductive, relatable and otherworldly. I mean, anyone paying attention should have expected something special, but I, for one, didn’t realise it would be this fantastic, this compelling, this era-defining.
I’m old enough to remember when people said electronic technology and digital potential would ruin music; I wish those people could listen to Xeno and tell me that such music hasn’t opened doors to worlds that analogue music could only dream of.
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