San Diego seems an unlikely place to produce a band such as Black Heart Procession, whose name could hardly be a more accurate harbinger of their music. After five albums (and one Solbakken collaboration, for the In the Fishtank series), Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel still generate an overcast, unique brand of misery. 2002's Amore del Tropico freed them from the monochromaticism of their opening trio of numbered albums. The Spell follows in similarly eclectic fashion, but is different in one important regard: This is the first Black Heart Procession album made by a fully integrated band, with the founding duo fleshed out by drummer Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse), bassist Jimmy LaValle and violinist Matt Resovich (both of the Album Leaf).
The spirit of collaboration-- potentially picked up from the Solbakken record-- is evident in the album's opening minutes. Plummer is a huge asset, providing the propulsive mechanism that takes most of these songs out of dirgeville and turns them into arresting pieces of cosmically depressing rock. Weird, though, how in music "depressing" can often be read as "uplifting," and certain of these tracks have that dualism operating within them, especially the drifting closer "To Bring You Back", which sets Jenkins's pallid croon awash in reverb and slide guitar.
The songs lend the album title several layers of meaning-- the trance-like compositions and static chord progressions take it literally, while Jenkins has penned a set of enjoyably enigmatic lyrics implying that the spell could be that of love or the grip of the government or media. The title track builds to an incredible climax, the vocal melody growing quicker and quicker until Jenkins's harrowing declaration "your spell on me/ It has no cure."
"Not Just Words" follows at (for these guys) a brisk tempo, slightly resembling recent Modest Mouse. Nathaniel's piano and Plummer's drums are both mixed high, while Resovich has a chance to take the lead in the song's chugging mid-section. Loud guitars carry "The Fix" and "GPS", the band's hardest-rocking songs to date. Jenkins' paranoia reaches new heights on "GPS" as he trots out Orwell with lines like "All our crimes revealed" and "would you believe all these things hang by a thread?" Amongst the kinetic explosions, though, there's still room for a little old-fashioned Black Heart Procession doom'n'gloom, courtesy of the anguished "The Letter" and "The Waiter #5", a nearly percussionless float down the River Styx straight into an underworld that it turns out has been frozen for eons.
The Spell is Black Heart Procession's best album, cohesive though it lacks the conceptual arc of its predecessor, and dynamically arranged, with the sense of interplay that flows naturally from a working band. It's no emotional picnic, but it contains moments of immense beauty and grand intensity, delivered from a wider palette than the group's ever used before.
