The Black Heart Procession “Six”
The memories are fuzzy. And by fuzzy, I might mean foggy. And by foggy, I probably mean gloomy. And by gloomy, I definitely mean black — raven black. It was 2002 — that much I’m sure of. There was one night in Los Angeles and another in Brooklyn and both occurred during the month of October. So, I’m pretty solid on the times and places, but much less so on everything else. Were there three men or four? Or, now that I think of it, were there five? Did two of them have long beards or did they all? Was one wearing a horse mask? I think so. But I wouldn’t swear by it.
There are a number of perfectly good reasons why I struggle to recall the particulars of those two concerts. For one thing, they occurred nearly a quarter century ago, during a time when phone cameras were useless and before Youtube became our auxiliary memory device. Also, they occurred late at night, well past my bedtime, in venues which (just to show how long ago it really was) were suffused with cigarette smoke that literally clouded everything. But mostly, I’ve forgotten the details of those two concerts for the very simple reason that The Black Heart Procession terrified me.
They also thrilled me. I’d been a convert — albeit a frightened one — from the very first time I heard them. Released in 1998 and entitled simply “I,” Black Heart’s debut album cover featured a yellowing, vintage vanity photo of a woman adrift in her thoughts. But everything else, from the artwork to the vinyl to the songs, was black. Clearly something had happened — something bad. That photo and those songs intimated certain damage. And I was desperate to know more. More music. More photos. More clues.
That year, on the basis of a couple zine reviews, Touch and Go mailorder catalogs and early internet rumors, I deduced that The Black Heart Procession were two men — Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel from sunny San Diego, California. Both men — according to my smudgy zine photos and misshapen internet gifs — appeared to have long, unwashed hair and bushy beards of indeterminate lengths. Both wore dusty blazers and rumpled shirts and old ties that looked like nooses and — apparently on special occasions — horse head masks. None of it made any sense. But all of it intrigued and titillated and (yes) terrified me in the way a Dario Argento movie could.
While they were plainly strange and technically strangers, I’d heard of Pall and Tobias before. Jenkins co-founded Three Mile Pilot, a band which had reimagined Hardcore as Pop music for computer games. Nathaniel then joined 3MP a couple chapters in. And while that band’s legend did eventually make its way from The Casbah in San Diego to my very first apartment in Brooklyn, it traveled at pre-internet speeds. The effects of The Black Heart Procession, however, were immediate — yearning, longing and aching in ways that I did not know Indie Rock could be. Eleven songs — six of which had the word “heart” in their titles — about loneliness and regret, performed almost exclusively on guitar, piano and singing saw. The rhythms were spare and crawling. The bass was a sad heartbeat. These were not Rock songs but rather nocturnes played like funeral dirges by a lapsed Hesher more interested in Bach than Metallica and a lapsed Punk more interested in Sam Fuller than Black Flag.
How could a band from sunny San Diego sound so bleak? How could those two guys make that music? How did Tobias make his piano sound like the bass and also like the drums? And how did Pall stretch his tenor so that it could plead and concede but not rise and fall in the way a normal voice would. For three straight years, I could not fathom The Black Heart Procession and also I could not get enough of them. I listened to their first three albums — an unholy trinity of love and loss — constantly. I tattooed their album art onto my arm. And I told anyone who would listen about this strange little band from San Diego who played the musical saw and who wore horse masks and who painted music with a palette that ranged from extremely dark grey to pitch black.
But no matter how deep their desolation, The Black Heart Procession also made me extremely happy. I appreciated the whole getup — the clothes, the style, the shtick. All of it. And — yes, of course — I loved the songs. Every single one of them. Not a dud to be found on “I,” “II” or “Three” — but holy shit “Release My Heart,” “It's a Crime I Never Told You About the Diamonds in Your Eyes" and “Waterfront (This Sinking Road)” are god tier. Despite my devotion, though, it was years before I’d get to see them live. They toured all of the West Coast and, seemingly, most of Europe before they showed even the slightest interest in New York. Needless to say, the distance only deepened my longing.
By October of 2002 my black heart fever had reached its pitch. But also, some things had changed. For one, the internet had started to shine a light on Black Heart’s darkness. They were still not a household name. They were not even nearly famous. But in Indie circles, they were known and admired. And in San Diego, they were art punk royalty. More to the point, 2002 was a gloomy season — just a year after 9/11 — wherein gloomy music did not land the same way it had a couple years earlier.
But most of all, The Black Heart Procession had changed. They’d grown. And, at the same time, they’d lightened up just a bit. Their fourth album, “Amore del Tropico” was richer than anything they’d done before. Bass and drums were present. There were violins and viola and backing singers. There were rhythms — actual rhythms. Some of them were Latin! It was an album made not by two (or three) men but by a band. And unlike its predecessors, which meditated upon a single emotion (heartache), “Amore del Tropico” was a sprawling mystery. It frequently sounded familiar. It sometimes sounded wonderful. But it was not quite the same Black Heart Procession who’d entranced me in 1998.
It was, however, the version of The Black Heart Procession that I would get to see live. In the Fall of 2002, just days after the release of “Amore del Tropico,” I made my way across the country, ostensibly for business but really to witness Black Heart in concert. And then, just a few weeks later, on the cusp of Halloween, I saw them again, back home in Brooklyn. After years of obsessing from a distance, my first two Black Heart shows occurred just days apart. And what’s stranger still is— apart from the expanded lineup, the musical saw and the horse mask — how little I recall from either show. The one thing I do recall with great certainty, though, was a feeling of finality. Those shows were the end of something.
As to what that “something” was, it’s hard to describe. It was the transition from minimalist nocturnes to full bodied Rock songs. It was the difference between hearing them alone in my bedroom and seeing them in person, alongside two hundred other fans. It was the realization that this music which once felt like a private mystery was now a public performance. It was a lack of longing and yearning. These changes were not necessarily bad things. Critics and fans seemed enthralled by “Amore del Tropico.” It was undeniably wonderful that the band could tour the world and fill larger rooms. It all amounted to a subtle shift — from gothic to noir. But it felt seismic to me.
Over the next seven years, the band who’d made three unerringly consistent records between 1998 and 2000, began to stretch out a bit. In 2004 they released a bracing mini-album with the Dutch Post-Rockers, Solbakken. And in 2006 they put out “The Spell,” a full length follow up to “Amore del Tropico” which traded the former’s Latin subterfuge for witchy Americana. If only because it was more taut and succinct, I preferred “The Spell” to “Amore del Tropico.” But also, my devotion had by that point faded.
After “The Spell,” it took another three years before Black Heart released a new album. And by 2009, when “Six” did finally arrive, Touch and Go, their beloved record label, had shuttered. Released on Temporary Residence, “Six” was pegged as a return to the minimalism of the band’s halcyon days. But from the outset, things seemed off. It wasn’t simply the demise of their label that portended doom. It was the track listing, which featured songs named “Drugs,” “Heaven and Hell” and “Suicide.” Whereas early Black Heart albums pushed right up to the brink of a wink, “Six” seemed like it might veer into goth cosplay. Even its cover, with the pagan crosses and redacted “SIX SIX SIX” hinted that the carnage was more B-movie horror than actual emotional distress.
I still own my copy of “Six.” It sits in its original shrink-wrap on a shelf next to the rest of my Black Heart albums and just to the left of Blonde Redhead. But I’ve never played it. To clarify, I’ve absolutely listened to the album but I’ve never played the record on vinyl. I had a promotional CD copy that I played a few times in 2009 before moving on and symbolically saying farewell to one of the defining bands of my twenties. In truth, all these years later, I don’t recall the music with any specificity. For years, the story I’ve told myself is that “Six” was thin and metronomic. That it was kind of bloodless — like Nick Cave without the romance or Leonard Cohen without the poetry. But also, for all I really knew, my story could have been pure fiction. Maybe it was what I needed to tell myself in defense of my lapsed fandom. Maybe “Six” lacked luster — maybe it was a xeroxed copy of a xeroxed copy of a band I once adored. Or maybe it was secretly great and I was simply too married and too not lonely and not longing to hear it on merit.
Whatever the real reason, “Six” was the one I’d left behind — and it probably would have remained that way. Because, despite the fact that I still listen to the band when the urge strikes me, and despite the fact that they hold a very dear place near my heart, I don’t think about The Black Heart Procession very often. Moreover, I’ve long assumed that The Black Heart Procession don’t think about Black Heart Procession very often. I’m not sure why that’s been my sense. But whereas so many bands reunite for a final homecoming or for nostalgia or for the allure of lucrative festival gigs, I long believed that The Black Heart Procession had fully, truly and willfully disappeared.
By all public appearances my assumptions seemed correct. Pall Jenkins maintained a sporadically updated website wherein old Black Heart ephemera could be purchased but wherein no news — much less new music — was being shared. As for Tobias Nathaniel, I had no idea. It was hard to imagine those two guys — who both seemed like indie lifers — just walking away. That being said, most young musicians don’t end up as old musicians. Most thrash and toil and struggle until they take up a second job that becomes a reluctant first career. And by 2020, with only a flickering passion for the band that I once obsessed over, and without any evidence to the contrary, that was precisely what I assumed happened to The Black Heart Procession.
But four years later, having pronounced them symbolically dead, I received proof of life. It was the strangest of clues — a thread really — that led to more questions than answers. It started, innocently enough, while I was searching for a place to stay in San Diego. As I refined my search from “San Diego hotel” to “San Diego boutique hotel” (don’t judge) and from an unlimited price range to my actual price range, I discovered Аврóра, a seemingly new, seemingly boutiquey spot designed by local artists and architects. From there, as I clicked the Аврóра website, I discovered Soet, a mostly vintage record shop inside Аврóра, run by a hip, middle-aged couple. And from there, it was just a few moments later when I realized that one half of said couple — the co-manager of the shop who also made artisanal knives — was Pall Jenkins. Thee Pall Jenkins.
Now on the one hand, the image of Pall Jenkins on the wrong side of fifty, with short, graying hair, wearing a leisurely button down, was a minor shock. But on the other hand, if twenty years ago somebody predicted that Pall’s second act involved selling turntables, knives and used Scott Walker records at a tiny Diego shop inside a boutique hotel, I might not protest. And in that way, my parasocial reunion with one of Black Heart’s co-founders was only mildly surprising. For sure, it was far less shocking than learning — just a few Google searches later — that Tobias Nathaniel had been living in Belgrade, Serbia for a decade. Neither of those surprises, however, could have prepared me for the real bombshell — that Pall and Tobias had re-banded as The Black Heart Procession and were touring and (allegedly) recording new music together again.
That last bit of news — that a band I had taken for dead and gone was actually alive and well — sent me reeling. The return of The Black Heart Procession floored me enough to reconsider everything I thought I knew about them. Enough to dust off and pore over their first three albums again. Enough to spend a couple nostalgic evenings with “Amore del Tropico” and “The Spell.” And — yes — enough for me to finally, reluctantly but necessarily, take “Six” off the shelf and out of its shrink-wrap.
My first second impression of “Six” was that the double LP appeared both lovingly handmade and patently overproduced. Handmade in that the art was clearly the work of Pall Jenkins hands — from the paper cutouts to the pagan figurines to the old fashioned, typewritten lyrics. But overproduced in that it consisted of four sides of (my version, at least) red vinyl, three of which featured music and the fourth of which featured no music but rather an illustration etched onto plastic. “Six” presented like something that cost much more money than it could ever reasonably make back through sales. Which is to say that it looked like interesting art but bad business.
My second second impression of “Six” was that the interesting art but bad business package was over-compensating for some musical deficit. But once I put the record on and reacquainted myself with cusp of middle age Black Heart, I realized that my assumption was only partially true. At thirteen songs and fifty minutes, “Six” was not short on material. And while the pagan symbols and goth tropes felt a little hacky, Black Heart had always verged on shtickiness. In fact, it was their deadpan shtickiness that had first entranced me. Several spins later, I decided that while most everything about “Six” was familiar — the yearning, the darkness, the singing saw, the nocturnal piano, the slow waltzes — everything also felt off.
Which brings me to my third second impression of “Six” — Pall sounds tired. I don’t know whether his voice was shot or whether it was an affect that he chose, but on “Six” he’s fading much more than he’s yearning. The aching tenor that had once defined the band is reduced to tired narration. Which leads me to my fourth second impression of “Six” — the rhythms. They clang like the steampunk, kitchen sinks of early Nineties Tom Waits and Nick Cave. To be clear, I really like Tom Waits and Nick Cave, and maybe especially early Nineties Tom Waits and Nick Cave. But two decades after the novelty of their predecessors, Black Heart sound like they are out of new ideas. They sound derivative. And more than they are derivative of their spiritual heirs, they sound derivative of themselves.
Whereas they once plummeted the depths of desire, “Six” clumsily descends into hell. To get there, though, they first have to traverse “Rats” (a song title), “Drugs” (also a song title) and “Suicide” (you guessed it). Black Heart’s greatness was always in their desperate, but straight-faced, insistence. As they approached middle age, though, that insistence curdled into obviousness. Most of “Six” feels like a bad Halloween costume. Or — check that — an obvious Halloween costume.
Most, but not all. By 2009, Black Heart’s flame may have dimmed, but it was not completely snuffed out. “When You Finish Me” opens the record with just Pall singing along to his distant echo, faint strings and Tobias’ piano. It is willfully simple but undeniably lovely — the kind of song that would make for a wonderful coda were it not for “Iri Sulu,” the album’s actual swan song. “Iri Sulu” is every bit as gutting as the opener — or as anything Black Heart made before. Before he says farewell, Pall asks:
Am I alive or am I dead?
Am I awake or in a dream?
Am I with you or am I all alone?
The Black Heart Procession had obsessed over these questions for more than a decade. But whereas in the beginning they were proferred as exorcistic examinations, in the end they were tragically rhetorical.
For anything to begin again it must first end. And in that way “Six” feels both inevitable and necessary — like the curtain closing to a half empty theater years before a triumphant revival. Perhaps more casual listeners would not think that it sounds so different from their “essential” albums. The horror tropes and the Halloween costumes were always part of the show. They were, after all, the band that came on stage in 2002 wearing a horse mark singing songs with titles like “Your Church is Red.” Dario Argento was always right behind Edgar Allan Poe on their list of their influences. But, to my mind, “Six” was the one wherein the implicit became explicit. And wherein the explicit became bored of itself.
There are some bands — The Smiths, Pink Floyd, The Police — who seem fundamentally, almost chemically incapable of reuniting. And there are others — GNR, The Eagles, Oasis — whose reunions were financially inevitable. But, as unlikely as it once seemed to me, the return of Black Heart Procession now feels like a restoration of order. It’s not simply that Pall and Tobias should be making music, or that they should be making music together, but that they should be making music together as The Black Heart Procession. For nearly fifteen years, the two men have been separated by one entire continent, one ocean, and most of another continent. And yet they are now touring and (allegedly, hopefully) recording together again because — while it appears both men have found love — the heart never stops yearning.