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.
I generally don't expect a stopgap EP to have any consistency of vision or direction, and this is true to that expectation. Oddly, it's continuously mixed so that all of these incongruous tracks flow seamlessly into one another as though they were conceived together. Let's be honest, though: You can pretty easily grab "Blank Page" and "Devotion" and leave the rest. And for those two songs alone, Blood Bunny / Black Rabbit is at least a worthwhile entry in the BHP catalog, if not one you'll need to hear all the way through more than once.
