Marvin Heemeyer spent 18 months gathering steel for his Komatsu bulldozer. He was going to layer large metal sheets over the cab and engine blocks of the dozer, then pour cement between the sheets to ensure the machine was impenetrable. This work was mostly done at night, in a shed on the property that Heemeyer had bought after moving to Granby, CO, in the early 1990s.
Before beginning work on his dozer, Heemeyer opened and ran a muffler repair shop on the property, becoming known in the small town for his impressive welding skills. But not long after he'd purchased the land, city officials infuriated Heemeyer when they informed him that he was responsible for connecting his shop to the district's sewer system, which would cost him upwards of $60,000. He refused to do so, setting off a years-long dispute with the town council that was further inflamed when the council approved the construction of a concrete plant right next to Heemeyer's property. A conviction consumed his mind that he needed to seek revenge for being domineered, that God was sending him on a mission to show the townspeople what true justice looked like. So, on June 4, 2004, Heemeyer rode his modified, armoured tank of a dozer through Granby, ramming into and destroying the town hall, the former mayor's home, and the office of the local newspaper, among several other structures. No one was killed by this demolition spree, but once it was over, Heemeyer took his own life.
The lead single off Madeline Johnston's fourth studio album as Midwife, No Depression in Heaven, joins a constellation of music — particularly in the metal genre — that has mined Heemeyer's story for inspiration. Aside from a Virginia sludge metal band naming itself Heemeyer, the Montreal doom metal band Dopethrone, North Carolina alternative metal band Lords and Liars and Swiss thrash metal Xonor each have a song called "Killdozer," which has been cemented as the moniker for Heemeyer's rampage and is the title Johnston has now given to her own track. While metal artists have latched onto Killdozer as a symbol of no-holds-barred rebellion against those who hoard power, Johnston, with her serene and serrated sound that she's dubbed "heaven metal," taps into and expands the emotional core of Heemeyer's well-trodden mythology, mapping it onto the increasingly inescapable scourge of gentrification.
"This has always been my town / Now it's a living hell," starts Johnston's "Killdozer," her typically haunting, reverb-drowned vocals emerging like mist. Her guitar riffs that open and propel the track are poppier and brighter than what would be characteristic of her music; they chime with melodies that feel nostalgically familiar, reflecting the song's retrospective gaze. After a stretch of the instrumental hook, a lyric parallels the opening one: "There used to be a city here / Now it's a dying breed." This assertion can apply to too many places that have had their identities effaced by gentrification, but Johnston is thinking about Denver, where she came up and played an organizing part in the DIY art scene before moving back to New Mexico a few years ago. DIY communities suffer significant blows when gentrification crops up; as rent skyrockets and changing neighborhood demographics lead to noise complaints and fines, DIY spaces struggle to stay open. The sense that there are threats encroaching from all angles, stemming from the government-condoned maneuvers of the wealthy and their disregard for the working class, is where Johnston traces a link to Heemeyer's experience. "Everyone wants a piece of me," she cries out on "Killdozer," poignantly inflecting the last word like a plea for mercy.
Mixed into this song about a city, and what it's like to watch many of the things you love about a place disappear, is a song about disconnection in a general existential sense — a prominent theme across No Depression as well as Midwife's whole discography, which dates back to 2017's Like Author, Like Daughter and grew out of Johnston's ambient drone work as Sister Grotto. At one point in "Killdozer," Johnston poses the question that sent characters in David O. Russell's 2004 film I Heart Huckabees into an anxious spiral: "How am I not myself?" The passive drifting that could eventually give way to such a question is explored most keenly on No Depression through the lens of touring, which is itself a piece of a larger puzzle the album contemplates: the commitments and costs of being a rock artist.
The dissociative blur of life on tour — the context in which Johnston wrote most of this recording — is evoked on "Droving," a term that refers to the process of walking livestock across long distances, providing Johnston with a fitting metaphor. Throughout the song's six minutes, as empyrean ambient tones bloom and evaporate, fingers slide along guitar strings, producing gurgles that zip past like vehicles on a highway: reverberations that absorb your attention for an instant, then leave you in a strange, shifted stillness. References to sleep amplify the soporific atmosphere and the sense of someone losing grip on reality. "I have always been asleep," Johnston drowsily sings, "Every night it's the same thing." And later, to simulate that all-consuming cycle, she repeats "It's like sleepwalking" (sometimes breaking up the verb to sound like "sleepwalk again"), over and over, until detachment resembles bliss.
As much as these elements suggest an endless stupor, and even though Johnston has described "Droving" as "a memorial piece to those we have lost in the scene," there are signs in the song that she's aiming to embrace ephemerality and fragility. She warns that "life like this could be our last song," but also tells someone she'll see them at the next show, which could reference the reliability of community as much as the possibility of an afterlife. Moreover, "Droving" isn't the last song on the album. It's followed by "Vanessa," which, in being an ode to Johnston's departed minivan, is also another ode to life in motion as a touring musician. Beyond personifying the van by giving it a name, Johnston sings to it as if to a lover turning away: "You don't look at me the way that you used to / You can't look me in the eye." It has the skeleton of an archetypal Midwife dirge: simple guitar loops that stack on top of each other as they build toward a brooding storm of swirling vocals, repeating phrases ad infinitum.
Gentle hi-hat clashes keep time throughout "Vanessa" like a mortal clock, so as Johnston entreats her van to "hold on just a little bit longer," there's a persistent reminder that its death is not far away. By contrast, the album's opening track, "Rock N Roll Never Forgets" (which is not a Bob Seger cover, though No Depression contains beautiful re-imaginings of Rowland S. Howard's "Autoluminescent" and Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone"), mulls over a kind of immortality. While songs like "Droving" and "Vanessa" approach the subject of rock music through its particulars, this opener zooms out to consider it in its most abstract form — as an eternal, godlike entity. The song's lyrics ascribe omniscience to rock n roll, but at the same time, Johnston pleads for it not to forget her, genuflecting at its altar and asking for protection. A similar tension exists between how Johnston sings that rock 'n' roll will "live forever," will "never die," while wondering whether it is merely a "dream," a "fantasy." At the top of the mix, lonely piano chords ripple out in triplets, like pebbles dropped into a pond; but buried deep beneath the surface are the abrasive shreds of an electric guitar, buzzing faintly as if to intimate that rock 'n' roll has been overpowered, reduced to a faded memory.
No Depression in Heaven takes its title from the classic country song recorded by the Carter Family in 1936, which, despite its chipper tune, spoke to the impossible difficulty of life during the Great Depression. The lyrics are bleak, painting a world rife with "toil and trouble," hurtling toward imminent doom. But as Johnston understands it, it's a traveler's ode, something to sing to yourself as you keep trekking from place to place, drifting between reality and reverie, impelled by a belief that, somewhere, some sort of respite will be found. This album — through its stirring, stripped-back guitar music and syllabus of cultural touchpoints — limns a path to that solace, and locates it alongside the toil and trouble that underlies rock 'n' roll's still-unfolding history.