The Black Heart Procession
1
SOLID BRASS
For a band with such an evocative name, The Black Heart Procession were never particularly inventive when it came to their album titles. Not that they needed to be. Centered around the creative partnership of Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel, both of whom had previously been in Three Mile Pilot, their music has always been both haunting and haunted—think Danny Elfman’s creepiest scores reimagined as maudlin indie rock. BHP have been lying dormant for a while now. Too long, in fact. But the frozen body is thawing. Though their last full-length album was released in 2009 (a sixth record naturally titled Six), they’ve still embarked on the occasional tour, most recently and notably in 2024 supporting Modest Mouse (Jenkins was Isaac Brock’s conspirator in Ugly Casanova, whose lone album was released in 2002).
The debut Black Heart Procession record was first released in 1998 and has long been hard (and expensive) to acquire. This reissue not only remedies that, but serves as a brilliant reintroduction to a criminally underrated and underappreciated band. From beginning to end, 1 sounds like the memory of a haunted house—or perhaps a haunted heart. It’s desolate, desperate, and despondent, with piano, saw, xylophone, synthesizers, and organ all sparsely combining to make a brittle body of work. Opener “The Waiter”—the first of a series of songs centered around a nameless protagonist who waits for rather than on someone, whose travails were spread across the band’s albums before being collected on their own EP—sets the dark, somber tone. A maudlin trudge into that liminal space between hope and despair, it also perfectly encapsulates the band’s moniker before the rest of the album follow suit.
Newly remastered, the ice-cold sorrow still permeates deep beneath the skin. “The Old Kind of Summer” is more of a wintry mix—forlorn and cold, with a subtle Parisian twist—while “Release My Heart” is a determined, but ultimately fruitless, plea for the kind of emotional refuge that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever fallen in love too hard, too much, too quickly. It’s one of seven song titles out of the 11 here that contain the word “heart,” but it never feels like overkill. Rather, the likes of “Heart Without a Home” and the swirling dramatics of brief instrumental “The Winter My Heart Froze” and the palpable pain of “Stitched to My Heart” all combine to create an overlying feeling of spooky, distressed melancholy that terrorizes your soul and, yes, heart, from beginning to end. A truly spectral, special album worthy of all the broken hearts that there have ever been and will ever be.
