Now that it’s springtime you’ve decided to hop in the car with your girl, get on the freeway and leave San Diego on a pleasure cruise through the sunny Southwest. But once you got out in the desert, you had a flat. And far, far worse: after you got up from changing your donut, a giant venomous spider was glowering at you, right where your girfriend had stood. That bitch shape-shifted on you, and in seconds your car was gone, she was gone, and you were lying face-down in the barren wasteland, poisoned and dying. Dude, bummer.
Welcome to the twisted world of the Black Heart Procession, where instead of a boundless, sun-soaked American frontier, modern day cowboys seek freedom/rebirth but find only desolation/peril. It’s dark (‘Places,’ ‘To Bring You Back’), the wind blows cold (‘Waiter #5,’ ‘Return to Burn’), and the women entangle you in webs (‘Tangled,’ and yet again in ‘The Spell’). The soundtrack to this tragic landscape is played song after song, with varying results.
This stuff is intermittently engrossing. Both ‘GPS’ and the title track use slowed-down, post-industrial beats, creating a mechanized coldness to match this band’s alien nightmares. Unfortunately, though, too much of The Spell is brought down by a surprisingly weak effort from singer Pall Jenkins, whose inability to be anything but himself, a thirty-something San Diego indie rock stoner, hardly makes him the appropriate ringleader for such a macabre circus. One wishes Neil Young, Johnny Cash or Nick Cave were around to pinch-hit, because really, critics’ comparisons of the Procession to any of these artists are unearned. For instance, Nick Cave’s multidimensionalism – his ability to be romantic or frightening, prophetic or nostalgic, rural or urban – lent endless complexities to his sinister vision of humanity. By contrast, BHP’s religious adherence to the approach they mapped out years ago seems two-dimensional.
This is odd considering that their previous full-length, Amore del Tropico, signalled the BHP were willing to both genre-bend and disguise Jenkins’s shortcomings with vocal effects and additional singers – but no such fusion or production ingenuity is present on The Spell. That’s not to say this band isn’t worth checking out – they’re doing stuff no other group is doing now, and when it does work, it hypnotizes. Instead of The Spell, though, interested parties should start with 1999’s 2 or 2000’s 3. From there, try the aforementioned Amore del Tropico; few will need more.
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