Send "The Black Heart Procession " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 For most of their first decade, the Black Heart Procession followed one of the most satisfying creative curves imaginable: Every album brought something new to the band's sound and was better than the one before it. A fan can't really ask for much more than that. What started as a Three Mile Pilot side project focused on doleful, monochromatic dirges blossomed into something more substantial, peaking with an excellent pair of albums that expanded the band's approach and conceptual framework: 2002's Amore Del Tropico and 2006's The Spell. There's a degree to which the only thing the band could do after that was consolidate its gains, and that's what Six did in 2009-- it was satisfying, but it was also the first album in the band's career that didn't expand what the Black Heart Procession could be.Blood Bunny / Black Rabbit doesn't do anything to reclaim the band's momentum. It's a textbook placeholder EP: three new songs and a clutch of five remixes that range from inconsequential to annoying. The thing that makes it worth a visit for fans is the fact that two of those new songs are truly excellent. The propulsive, mostly instrumental "Blank Page" is a curious inclusion here. With its succession of distinct melodic themes and instrumental textures, it feels like the overture to a conceptual work along the lines of Amore Del Tropico. The band could probably build a good album off of it, actually-- I hope it isn't left to languish here. The other standout is "Devotion", one of the band's best songs to date. It builds off a chant-like vocal before dropping into a dark, slippery bass groove, and it balances inherently hyperbolic, melodramatic lyrics like "you rip out my guts" with understated instrumental breaks that temper its out-of-control emotional content. If those two songs were the meat of an album, we'd really have something, but of course that's not the case. "The Orchid" is nearly a retreat to the band's early dirge days, and two remixes of Six's "Drugs" by Eluvium and Jamuel Saxon, respectively, add little to the song. One merely makes it a longer, dronier instrumental, while the other adds a beat. They're fine as remixes go but not essential listening. Much more puzzling is the Lee "Scratch" Perry psych-dub freakout that follows "Devotion". It has its moments of shivering psych appeal, but the opening, in which Perry meows like a cat and mumbles, is irritating, and I say that as someone who likes a lot of Lee Perry's music. Mr. Tube basically just makes "Heaven Below" less interesting, while "Silence" (also a Mr. Tube joint) comes off like an attempt to recast BHP as Einsturzende Neubauten Jr. Mr. Tube is actually an interesting project (in which Pall Jenkins of BHP sings and produces), but these tracks aren't the best introduction to it....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| The Black Heart Procession is one of the most reliable brands in indie rock, year after year delivering full-length platters of Southern gothic romanticism and bulletproof songcraft. Even after a three-year silence, when the group reemerged last year with Six, the dirge picked up right where the previous albums left off. Because the duo of Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel have several other sterling outlets for purging their less-depressing compositions, including the recently revived Three Mile Pilot, you know what you're going to get when you pick up one of BHP’s six full-lengths. The EPs, however, have often been a space for the band to indulge in some quiet experiments, such as their extended investigation into their own carnivalesque soundworld in 2000’s Fish the Holes in Frozen Lakes EP, the almost-industrial electronic textures and sampled voices on 2003’s Hearts and Tanks EP, and their proggy collaboration with Solbakken for the In the Fishtank series in 2004. The Black Heart Procession’s newest EP, Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit, offers up 40 minutes of new songs and remixes, sequenced into a continuous mix to create an extended composition that lacks any of the atmospheric unity of a typical BHP album, though it contains a few exhilarating moments. While “Devotion” exemplifies one such moment — slow-burning and soul-inflected, with intriguingly passive-aggressive lyrics — the new songs are mostly inessential: “Blank Page” is a chugging, piano-led vamp whose only lyric is pretty apt (“So here we are/ With nothing to believe”), while “The Orchid” is a drifting piano sketch. Remix albums have become commonplace in the indie rock world, but this is the first for BHP, and they took a conservative approach to most of the remixes, limiting the cast of remixers mostly to San Diego scene-mates such as Jamuel Saxon and… um… themselves, as in the two remixes by Mr. Tube, Pall Jenkins’ junkyard-funk side-project. Pall seems to have even re-recorded his own vocals as whispers for Mr. Tube’s moody, sub-Einstürzende Neubauten remix of Six’s already moody “Suicide.” Is it then a Mr. Tube vocal or a BHP vocal? Unfortunately, issues such as these are more interesting conceptually than musically, as are most of the EP’s remixes. These remixers often change the names of their source songs, obscuring the songs’ origins as remixes, and since many are remixed by the same people who recorded the originals, they seem more like revisions or slightly-modified drafts rather than the re-imaginings that we expect from a good remix. This change of context and author is not required for a good remix, but the remixes largely don’t even deliver sonically — most are very light remixes that drop out a few of of the instruments and up the atmosphere....full text |
| Rocksound |
| If recent The Black Heart Procession albums have erred a little too much on the side of polished, Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel have steered firmly back into murkier waters with this collection of remixes and new material. The mournful piano dirge of ‘The Orchid’ and the morbid chugging ‘Devotion’ chart familiar BHP territory but their choice of remixers has taken them out of their comfort zone, dub legend Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry adds some skank (and cat impressions) to the curious ‘Freeze’, Eluvium spins ‘Drugs’ into 10 minutes of edgy ambient swirl, while Jamuel Saxon transforms the same track into a frantic haunted dubstep....full text |
The Black Heart Procession lyrics
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