4 out of 5

Label: Cargo

Producer: Ryan Hadlock

The intensely sad and passionate first few tracks of BHP’s 1 held me in such an amazing spell that I thought I had finally discovered another album to add to my short list of depressive masterpieces – which includes Sparklehorse’s Vixadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot – but alas, the spell is very quickly, eh, disspelled when the group drops the veil a bit for the middle of the album.  It regains it before things shamble to their conclusion, and overall it’s still an affecting experience, but the slight shift in mood is noticeable on each listen to the album.

I dunno from whence BHP sprang, but I’d always sort of brushed them off as… hm, not exactly a shtick band, but purposefully sad waltzy music, as drenched in a particular style as Arab Strap, another group I should probably revisit.  To my ears at the time (prime Me music jerk era – late 90s, early 00s) I required a tad more obscurity (no matter how much I want to deny that), and Procession were Touch and Go darlings by that point, and I needed more angularity… my collection of quirkier, angrier stuff was growing then.  To be fair, the middle tracks on ‘1’ are sort of what I expected from the band, unveiled metaphors about sadness and loss, set to dusty, waltzy shuffles.  Because I’m far enough away from the crowds now, and have gotten old and arthritic and thus seek out quieter music (j/k ya’ll noise rock 4 life), I can appreciate this style more, though I do wonder if those songs were the majority of the listen and not sandwiched between much more effective fare if I would enjoy it as much.

What works so well is how the first three tracks build you up… slowly… with the theremin-soaked The Waiter, a perfect opener haunted by background voices and laughter and echos, to bringing in some ringing guitar and the vocals kicking up to a painful warble (from a whisper) on ‘The Old Kind of Summer,’ which then breaks your heart into millions of piecey pieces when it drops the drums into the mix with a beautifully powerful thump on ‘Release My Heart,’ it’s repeated yearning plea totally bringing me to tears, no lie.  All of these songs swoon together.  I’m not claiming to know how to have maintained that mood, but when ‘Heart’ ends and the next track begins without much ceremony, without much buildup – vocals and music kicking in to a steady pace that could easily be called a definable BHP sound – and the POV in the lyrics switches too (for most of the song)… I dunno.  ‘The Waiter’ is in third person, but it seems fitting to start the album impersonally before shifting to more personal tracks, and then that fourth track tells a clever “story”, and the next few tracks follow suit.  As said, they’re good songs, they just feel, for better or worse, like filler in comparison to the power and emotion at album’s start.  Thankfully, the album is a short affair, and the theremin comes back into play to wind things down for the last few tracks, stripping us of musical elements the way they were initially built in.  It’s an amazingly haunting listen, and only loses a star when tracks are compared to themselves, but such is the nature of shit.  Or so it is when I’m writins it.  yarrrrr