They hail from Bring It On's hometown, sunny San Diego, but the Black
Heart Procession make the most Southern Gothic music, music that
deliberately dwells deep in the darkest of cast shadows. And,
shrouded in such, they romanticize this darkness, singing lustily in
tortured wails and wracked-man murmurings over spare, sullen, almost
maudlin tunes. Their fourth album, Amore del Tropico, has been
proudly talked up as being The BHP's most "pop" effort yet, but, upon
listening, it's hardly a surprise that it's hardly a pop record, or
anything close. A few dalliances with upbeat tempos or
less-than-baroque instruments hardly make this Summer Days (And
Summer Nights!!); the album's tone and tunes and imagery and such
are all still on the same haunted-house/boat-of-the-dead kinda kick
they've kicked out on their three previous, numerically-titled jams.
Favoring instruments like antique pianos and pump organs amongst the
normal rock clutter, Tobias Nathaniel and Pall A Jenkins, the main
men behind this darkly-dressed outfit, seek to cultivate a bleak and
bitter tweak on the "carnival" atmosphere, their songs dispensing
calliopes and the like to make music that moves like a lurid parade
of the grotesque, the gentle arrangements of strings and percussion
and looming minor-key chords wilfully establishing this romanticized
air of spookiness. From its cover on down, Amore del Tropico
is a concept-record, the black-hearted pair longing to tell the tale
of a good old-fashioned murder mystery. Its showstopper is "A Cry for
Love," a sinister waltz-time torch song in which pizzicato strings
and doo-wop backing vocals stir an almost David Lynch-like atmosphere
in which the record's disturbed protagonist bewails his committed
crime of passion.
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