Black Heart Procession Spell CD

The Black Heart Procession: Jimmy LaValle, Pall A. Jenkins, Joe Plummer, Matthew Resovich, Tobias Nathaniel.
Personnel: Paul Jenkins (vocals, guitar, lap steel guitar, organ, synthesizer, musical saw); Tobias Nathaniel (guitar, piano, organ, Wurlitzer organ, timpani); Matthew Resovich (lap steel guitar, violin, Wurlitzer organ, synthesizer); Jimmy LaValle (piano, organ).
Recording information: SDRL (2005).
Unknown Contributor Role: David Babbitt.
THE SPELL, the seventh release from San Diego's the Black Heart Procession, combines the band's early minimalist tendencies with the rock richness of 2002's AMORE DEL TROPICO. The Procession still wade in dark, melancholic waters, offering up Gothic Americana soundscapes of bleak introspection, but on the aptly named THE SPELL they add inspired songcraft, rock guitars, and pointed lyrical themes--political and otherwise--to their trademark atmospherics. The blend of elements, along with a sense of underlying tension in the playing and song structures, makes THE SPELL one of the band's most consistent and exciting releases.
San Diego's Black Heart Procession traffics in spectral, timeless music; it could be the audio backdrop for Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," the score to a Fritz Lang silent film, or the soundtrack to some post-apocalyptic landscape. Since their debut, 1, in 1998, Black Heart has been steadily filling out their sound, which seemed initially constructed of nothing more than ghostly synth washes, reductive basslines, saw moans, keyboards, and singer Pall A. Jenkins' yearning vocals (their second record, 1999's 2, was almost percussion free). By 2002's murder mystery narrative, Amore del Tropico, Black Heart had added a Latin twist and varied the funereal pace of their earlier records by emphasizing the guitars and punching up some songs until they practically rocked. Amore's greatest conceit was sustaining Black Heart's essence while adding layers of additional sonic textures from a host of contributing musicians. But Amore proved difficult to replicate live, so Black Heart's co-founders and main songwriters -- Jenkins and multi-instrumentalist Tobias Nathaniel -- trimmed the contributing roster for the next record, leaving only themselves, drummer Joe Plummer (Magic Magicians, Modest Mouse) and Album Leaf members Jimmy LaValle (bass) and Matt Resovich (violin) to concoct The Spell together as a band. While such a shift could have signaled a return to pre-Amore minimalist sonics, The Spell is instead a pitch-perfect blend of Black Heart past and present, and a recording as accomplished as any that navigates similarly dark seas. It combines the musical urgency and guitar accentuation of Amore with the ethereal spookiness of Black Heart's earlier records, and expands the band's palette by adding ominous, riff-heavy stomps to songs awash in Orwellian menace. The latter informs the core of The Spell, which compares the bewitching nature of love -- a Black Heart staple -- with society's witting compliance in modern mind-control (especially post-9/11). "All our fears are fed/All our thoughts are read," Jenkins howls on the politically charged "GPS" as staccato guitar bursts and door-pounding percussion reinforce the song's 1984 tenor. Disc opener "Tangled," "The Fix," and the title track also feature pulsating guitar lines -- alternately played by Jenkins and Nathaniel -- and insistent drum beats high in the mix. These songs echo the nervous energy of the best of Amore (minus the salsa), and together with shifting tempos and time signatures evoke apprehension and excitement in equal measure. But fans of Black Heart's curtain-drawn studio incarnation -- where synth winds howl, saws whine, and organs creak -- need not feel nostalgic. "The Waiter #5" unfurls in languorous grace, fueled by Jenkins' ghostly saw (making its lone appearance on The Spell). "Return to Burn" crawls menacingly from some prehistoric swamp with Jenkins' lap steel as siren's cry, aAlternative Press (p.192) - "Bewitching from front to back, the album groans under the weight of despondent piano lines, high-tension guitar patterns and Jenkin's hypnotic lyrics/vocals -- all of which conspire to lull the listener into some sort of uneasy stasis."
CMJ (p.4) - "Pall Jenkins' voice is at its gloomy, Nick Cave-y best as he croons over ominous orchestrations of languid pianos, tense, horror movie strings and keening organs."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.106) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "Formerly cryptic, his ghostly wail is now pleasingly direct, whether he's decrying lost love or the state of US politics."