Label: Touch & Go Format: CD,LP
Let’s give Three” the moodiest album of 2000 award. If we are passing out any awards that is. Black Heart Procession capture gloom and wrap it up in matte-coloured cowboy Goth like nobody’s business. Unfeigned resignation to everything is the raison d’etre and the low level chronic depressive sound topped up with teardrop pianos and rimmed with just right amount of experimental noises blends into a heavy, heavy roll sans rock that is so specific it is difficult to pigeon-hole. There is no real climax or decent, but an even tonal and disonant string-out of sadness.
Still Pall Jenkins, Tobias Nathaniel, Jason Crane and their accomplices do like to play around a little with weird horns, telephone manipulations, a singing saw, space echoes and probably whatever else is to hand. It must be said that their gloom is not the brand used in adolescent abundance of the usual Goth variety. This is more like the Blues, and one does suspect a great knowledge of R&B to be in the collective educations of Black Heart Procession. Theirs is a weariness generally only achieved after some years of hardship and heartache, which belies their pictoral age, really. The mixture is nice; it’s easy to see the band in a picturesque desert setting, gutiars on knees around the lonesome campfire, but what is more of a challenge is to rectify their synths and samplers fitting into the picture as well as they fit their sounds. And they make my shoulders sway.
I have listened to Three about a hundred times over, just because I like it and I wonder if Black Heart Procession can achieve some commercial success. More likely, thank goodness, they will be able to soundtrack some dark film or another and make a little money but stay on the relatively obscure side of the circuit. One thing is for sure, sort of: they won’t be going off making dance records any time soon. Of course now that I have said that…
-Lilly Novak-
