The Black Heart Procession
One

LA RECENSIONE

The procession of the black heart has just set out.

This album sounds dark as a starless night, ominous like a warm wind bringing dark omens, heavy like a cart full of the diseased advancing slowly and relentlessly, indifferent to everything.

This first work, now unavailable, by the Black Heart Procession could not have a more fitting title than the band’s own name, a masterpiece of hermeticism and visionariness and a true programmatic manifesto of their almost unique style in the most apocalyptic and comforting American post-rock landscape.
The first album by the Black Heart Procession simply called one lives and feeds on darkness, on disturbing presences never so "deeply" close. Already at the first notes, you realize you will have no escape: its atmospheres will pierce you 'inside and out', turning your soul inside out like the last breath of a loved one leaving you, it will enter your DNA like a sickly and pleasant breeze at the same time from which you won't easily free yourself.

This 'One' is the liquefied wax dripping from the candle you hold in your hand taking part in the sad procession, the taste of the saliva you swallow as you bid farewell to a love now gone, the vague disorientation you feel in a dimly-lit room with no windows and no way out. And you find yourself hopelessly alone with the painful and reverberating sounds of a distant piano as you hear your black heart begin its slow and relentless procession towards the absolute perdition that you are seeking.
No devilry, no strange electronic alchemy or complex and intricate arrangements: one is left alone, hopelessly alone accompanied only by the sound of a guitar, an organ, a lazy drum beat and a saw (!), played, embraced and caressed with a violin bow by the singer and leader Pall A. Jenkins who is the Grand Ceremonizer of the procession (on vocals, guitar and indeed, the sounds of the saw). Assisting him is the gloomy and diaphanous Tobias Nathaniel on the piano, keyboards, and subtle devilries (who, with Pall, among other things, was one of the founders of Three Mile Pilot).

A heart-wrenching and disarmingly melancholic album for the beauty and poetry that emanates from every single silence, never has there been a 'presence' as dark and undisputed protagonist of these painful 11 tracks as on this record. Among the various tracks, "Even thieves couldn't lie" stands out, with its prominent guitar and piano, and "Stitched to my heart", its mirror soul with a soft yet filled atmosphere, while among the more sustained pieces " Square heart", " Release my heart" and "Blue Water, Black Heart" make their mark as true consecrated pillars of the repertoire of ours.
After the interlude from a Tim Burton soundtrack (the 56-second orchestral "The Winter My Heart Froze"), we return to the dark and damned twilight atmospheres of 'Stitched To My Heart' (note how the word 'Heart' is reiterated 7 times in the titles of the 11 tracks!!)

The album concludes with a masterful "In a tin flask" supported by an old-time piano, almost Gothic in its obsessive pace framing farewell words spoken while barely holding back tears. The final "A heart the size of a horse", is the nihilistic and tormented farewell (with a spectral organ dissolving into an infinite reverb as if played by its own echo) of a debut already mature and complete (the subsequent 'Two' and 'Three' will follow the pattern of this quite faithfully).

The long procession has come to an end, or rather, it has turned the corner and disappeared from our frozen sight while our black heart is still there pulsing, altered by this wave of uncontrollable emotions like the darkness of a starless night, like waking up dazed from a coma, like being hugged by a sincere friend in a moment of heartfelt participation, like that uncontrollable urge to cry without even knowing why that we all have felt at least once in our lives.