Like any good soldiers, the troops in the Paper Chase's rock 'n' roll
troupe are known only by their surnames: Congleton, Kirkpatrick, Weaver,
Dalton. As soldiers, they're soldiers in the army of godlessness, God
Bless Your Black Heart being an existentialist concept record(!) in which
Congleton (John) asks all the big questions, tossing out his
inquisitions on the nature of reality and the notion temporality and the
validity of human existence into the void of nothingness that is this
life, barely believing that there's even a god to try and answer them.
The words "god" and "heart" are his lingual touchstones throughout the
record, arising in almost every song, almost every song finding such
— so much crossing and blessing of hearts, so much swearing and blessing
to and from God — spat from his lips with a sinuous screech, his
tortured wails wailing away as the band's strange take on guitar-rock
bangs in clamorous discordance all around him. Whilst some might even
dare to try and paint this dystopian disc as being a kind of grandiose,
Godspeed!ian effort whose symphonic strains are stacked up to build
hymns to a godless modern world, the truth is that all of Congleton's
conceptions are in league with a band beholden to clanging guitars and
incongruous tonalities, their fractured, spastic assembly of hardcore
tension and grand ambition making for strange listening, the Paper Chase
stumbling into dark, difficult places in which everything seems a little
bit "off." Seemingly taking its cue from Congleton's willfully bizarre
screaming, the band favors atonalism and discordance in its
cobbled-together brand of mighty-uptighty protest rock. Even strings
and piano, so long defined as additions of "beautify," are
used incongruously, set in oppositional disharmony to the Albini-esque
lurch that's the band's garage-band essence, these "symphonic" additions
just creating more friction and dissonance. This only adds to the
overall sense of unease felt on God Bless Your Black Heart, the
uneasiness of these disharmonic juxtapositions transposing the unease
Congleton feels with the world itself into uneasy music. It's taken
him, and the Paper Chase, four albums to feel at ease in this unease, to
feel comfortable in such artistic skin, finally able to make their
marriage of math-rock precision and wonky piano-bashing and littered
samples and theatrical vocals seem like a vital artistic vision. It's a
many-albums-in moment "maturation" that makes this disc easy to compare
to the likely likes of At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command and the
Blood Brothers' ...Burn, Piano Island, Burn, discs that'll likely be
the big pop-cultural reference points many will chart it by.
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