Somewhere in the great filing cabinet of rock is a bulging manila folder marked "great ideas," and right behind it is a somewhat less bulging file marked "great outcomes." Keep searching, and you'll also find a huge, tattered file called "mixed results," and that's where you'll undoubtedly find a cache of documents on Konkurrent's In the Fishtank series. The idea is surely a great one: Grab one or two bands as they tour through the Netherlands, put them in the studio for a couple of days together, give them the run of the place, and release the results on an EP. Those results, however, vary wildly in quality.
This is the eleventh In the Fishtank release, and it's become clear as the series has progressed that this process doesn't work for everybody-- Willard Grant Conspiracy & Telefunk, in particular, couldn't get an interesting record together-- but when the bands are roughly of a piece with each other (Low & The Dirty Three, or Motorpsycho & Jaga Jazzist, for instance), it can produce fascinating, even excellent music. I confess that I know very little about Dutch prog trio Solbakken-- I couldn't even lazily look them up on All Music Guide, because they don't have an entry-- but from what I can gather from limited audio samples, they subordinated themselves almost completely to their sparring partners: This procession is decidedly black-hearted in every respect.
Black Heart Procession have been riding an upward quality arc ever since their debut, culminating in 2002's masterful expansion on their sound, Amore del Tropico. And while this EP doesn't approach such great peaks, it also proves they're in no mood to revisit the persistently inky American primitive terrain their initial trio of numbered LPs trod upon. That's not to say things are getting all sunshine and lollipops in the Black Hearts camp, but the sound they've settled on here is the most reverberant I've heard from them. This is perhaps one of the biggest values of a series like this-- its casual, off-the-cuff nature shows sides of bands that perhaps even the members themselves didn't realize existed.
From minute one to thirty-four, the EP is dominated by the heavy piano of Black Heart Procession's Tobias Nathaniel, who does the most to shape the music's tone and color. Black Heart vocalist Paulo Zappoli (formerly known as Pall Jenkins) hides in towers of reverb, but it's startling how much range he shows here, relative to the average Black Heart Procession album, letting himself employ a gentler delivery than usual on several tracks. Guest vocalist Rachael Rose (she's not in either band) complements him nicely with a spoken French monologue on opener "Voiture in Rouge", and amidst the billowing, romantic piano parts, it's criminally sensual.
The EP's most impressive achievement, though, is "Things Go On with Mistakes", a 10-minute thriller propelled by both bands' drummers. This is the most obviously collaborative composition, building up from a chorused bassline and sparse guitar, and eventually spilling over with piano, organ, guitar and hyperactive percussion. It's songs like this that illustrate the full potential of the Fishtank, and make a case that the project's "great outcomes" folder might one day grow larger than the "great ideas" one.
