Like costume shops, pumpkin beer, and playoff baseball, the Black Heart Procession are at their peak in the month of October. Adept at pulling off the delicate task of making legitimately unsettling, spooky music without sounding like a novelty, sipping from the BHP's skull-shaped chalice as the weather cools and the nights grow longer is a perfect seasonal accompaniment. So good work guy who schedules Temporary Residence record releases; you deserve a raise. What better way to enjoy my run-up to All Hallow's Eve festivities than with the band so overflowing with dread and gloom they made an album called Amore Del Tropico sound like one of David Lynch's cinematic nightmares?
No album title dissonance here, as Black Heart Procession return to the numerical nomenclature of their first three records with Six. But the name on the spine isn't really a tip-off about a return to the band's earlier, sparser approach-- rather, it seems like they just couldn't resist emphasizing the numerology of their sixth album, what with the obvious significance of six-in-triplicate (and yes, I couldn't resist the rating). Sure enough, the devil is all over Six, namedropped as early as the second track, "Wasteland", and most of the record's 13 (of course!) songs are drenched in gothic imagery that often veers towards the outright biblical.
There's virtually no activity, no matter how mundane, that can't be rendered Dantean by Pall Jenkins, Tobias Nathaniel, and their coven-mates. The extreme up and downs of love are described as no less than Heaven and Hell repeatedly, and scenes of execution and desolation predominate-- it's rock'n'roll for Cormac McCarthy. Singer Pall Jenkins doesn't just get dumped, he gets hung at the gallows and burned at the stake on "Back to the Underground". A nighttime city walk turns into a house of urban horrors on "Rats", a travel narrative of pimps and alleys and moon-devils that seems a rather harsh and unlikely judgment on the band's hometown of San Diego.
Musically, the setting is no less full of darkness and heavy fog. There are a few horror-soundtrack nods-- the obligatory musical saw and funeral-home organ making several appearances, the John Carpenter drum intro of "Suicide"-- but BHP largely avoid horror-soundtrack cues or cheap scares. Much more subtle and unsettling is the band's piano, walking between beautiful and creepy, or the band's hi-low vocal tricks à la TV on the Radio, where in-control monotone cannot mask the high-pitched, near-hysteria wail hovering above. While nothing could be considered overwrought, one can't help but miss some of the empty space and creaky drum loops that were the cobwebs dressing up Jenkins' dark brooding on their earlier numbered records.
In other places, the Black Heart Procession avoid gimmickry by squeezing unexpected dread out of trad-indie sounds. There's an oddly glistening synth snaking through "Witching Stone", "Rats" has a sinuous bassline cobbled together from the scrap parts of "Owner of a Lonely Heart", and "Forget My Heart" sounds a helluva lot like... Spoon, who might be the last band I would ever describe as frightening. In more ornate moments, the eerie pizzicato of "All My Steps" demonstrates what they can do with a fuller sound, and more lush strings are employed to appropriately melodramatic effect on the hypnotic "Liar's Ink".
Yet the commendable atmospheric consistency aside, the relentless danse macabre might grow tiresome for the faint of heart, uninterrupted as it is by any islands of contrast. You know that point in a haunted house where you just kind of wish it was over, as the 15th chainsaw/hockey-mask guy jumps out at you from a nook in the plyboard? That's the feeling I get late in Six, when the album reaches a song called, flatly, "Suicide" and the heaven-and-hell imagery starts to wear out its welcome with a reprise on "Last Chance." For while, the Black Heart Procession does an excellent job of musically embodying October's primary mood, they'd do well to remember that it's a month made more bearable by the occasional flash of Indian summer.
