Despite the outright denial in its title, death is present in every one of the songs on Never Die, the collaborative album from Midwife’s Madeline Johnston and Matt Jencik (of Implodes, Don Caballero, and Slint’s live band). Jencik held the tenderest thought imaginable when he came up with that phrase—Never Die—the fact that the people he loves eventually would, a certainty that feels impossible and remote, until the day it absolutely doesn’t. Never Die represents Jencik’s desperate bid to hold onto everyone he loves, to keep them on Earth so fiercely that they might enter the grave with claw marks on their skin. Johnston, who recognizes the grace of mortality (and who, as Midwife once sang: “I don’t wanna live forever,” over and over) serves as the spiritual guide for the album, transmuting the fear of death into an incentive to live more keenly and dearly.
Never Die offers a calm confrontation with the dour inevitability that bookends our lives. When the fact of death looms over life, it tends to denature every experience we have and every relationship we know we’ll eventually have to forfeit back to the Earth. No one, no matter how hard we love, makes it out of this alive thing. But we feel anyway. And we love anyway. And we sing anyway. Here, Jencik and Johnston have sung ‘die’ over and over, snowglobing life in the process.
Available in Black or Coke Bottle Clear Vinyl from Relapse Records.