The Black Heart Procession - Six Review

Like costume shops, pumpkin beer, and playoff baseball, the Black Heart Procession are at their peak in the month of October. Adept at pulling off the delicate task of making legitimately unsettling, spooky music without sounding like a novelty, sipping from the BHP's skull-shaped chalice as the weather cools and the nights grow longer is a perfect seasonal accompaniment. So good work guy who schedules Temporary Residence record releases; you deserve a raise. What better way to enjoy my run-up to All Hallow's Eve festivities than with the band so overflowing with dread and gloom they made an album called Amore Del Tropico sound like one of David Lynch's cinematic nightmares?

No album title dissonance here, as Black Heart Procession return to the numerical nomenclature of their first three records with Six. But the name on the spine isn't really a tip-off about a return to the band's earlier, sparser approach-- rather, it seems like they just couldn't resist emphasizing the numerology of their sixth album, what with the obvious significance of six-in-triplicate (and yes, I couldn't resist the rating). Sure enough, the devil is all over Six, namedropped as early as the second track, "Wasteland", and most of the record's 13 (of course!) songs are drenched in gothic imagery that often veers towards the outright biblical....full text The Black Heart Procession’s sixth full-length is, as you might expect, moody, gothic and quivering with existential dread, a dark-toned graze through waltz-time piano ballads, twitchy, slouching, tamped down guitar rock and eerily keening musical saws. Its tenderest song, “Drugs,” observes the circling-down-the drain-resolution of a love for an addict. Its most propulsive cut, “Suicide,” considers the upside of ending it all. Images of heaven, hell and the devil lurk in a good plurality of the songs (god is less prominent). Yet, like 2007’s Spell, Six is prone, at the most unlikely moments, to spontaneously burst out of its downer straightjacket and rock out, with the abyss-staring intensity of the Gutter Twins or Wovenhand. (I’d add Nick Cave if BHP had even the slightest sense of humor.)


Six’s name harks back to the first three numbered Black Heart Procession albums, the records where Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel worked out a sparse and echoey aesthetic. In subsequent albums, they collected a small group of musical collaborators, but here with Six it’s mostly just the two of them, switching among instruments. The result is, perhaps, a paring down, a simplicity, but not exactly a sparseness. The best and most immediately memorable songs here – “Witching Stone,” “Rats,” “Forget My Heart” and, especially, “Suicide” – ratchet up the tension with terse, clamped down guitar lines. “Witching Stone” has an almost pop feel, its ominous down-slanting strums smoldering under a singable, melodic chorus. “Rats,” with its slithery, sulpherous bass line and sudden crashes of guitar, evokes the aimless anxiety of wandering insomnia. “Suicide,” the best of the three, flashes synth tones like signals of danger ahead, repetitive throbs pulsing from one speaker to another like a heartbeat pushing to arrhythmia. Tense with threat, glowering with suppressed feeling, the cut is sleek and menacing and utterly compelling....full text Disc 11 When You Finish Me
2 Wasteland
3 Witching Stone
4 Rats
5 Heaven and Hell
6 Drugs
7 All My Steps
8 Forget My Heart
9 Liar's Ink
10 Suicide
11 Back to the Underground
12 Last Chance
13 Iri Sulu...full text