Three Mile Pilot and Black Heart Procession

Three Mile Pilot, an avant-rock combo from San Diego led by singer Pall Jenkins (Paolo Zappoli), debuted with Na Vucca Do Lupu (Negative Pulse, 1992), which was recorded by a trio of vocals, bass and drums, with no guitar. The sinister, stammering, slow-burning litany of One Step Ladder sounds like a cross between Minutemen and Smashing Pumpkins. Sore Loser features liquid funk riffs in a spacey ambience, and a spastic crescendo that sounds like Police on crack (as does Feeling Bald). This is rock music of coarse subtlety, full of tacit emotion, only loosely moored to melody, frank and passionate but also restrained and allusive, a descendant of Jesus Lizard's post-hardcore dejection. Nowhere is this subtlety more evident than in the sublime desperation of Illwrath, whose hooks and spasms recall the classics of garage-rock like 13th Floor Elevator but filtered through urban alienation and meaning deprivation. Horse Sweat performs a similar operation on the tuneful, existential balladry of Soul Asylum and Thin White Rope.
The relatively anthemic Slow Hand deconstructs early Doors. Over a painful six-minute excursus, Pinhut takes off as one of Neil Young's ruminations and reaches a climax that recalls blues-rock jamming of bands such as Cream and Jimi Hendrix Experience. An overdose of repressed thoughts expands this idea into the nine-minute (each) agonies of Unicycle Silencer and Dirt On The Flag Mud On The Wheel. The latter is the ultimate statement from the band, with a bit of Velvet Underground-ian trance and plenty of teenage angst.
The hypnotic lamentation of Paralyzed is another tour de force (seven minutes) of angst and self-flagellation, perhaps the ultimate emotional outpouring of the album.
The kids try a little too hard to sing catchy refrains: their refrains are not catchy, and their music is plain scary. Melody couldn't be more removed from their musical landscape. But, even with its shortcomings, this is an important album, rich in both nuances and depth.

The EPs Circumcised (Cargo, 1993) and Star Control Out (Negative, 1995) boast the intellectual quality of late 1970s new wave and the emotional charge of 1980s hardcore.

Tom Zinser (drums) and Armistead Burwell Smith (bass, piano, cello) rule on Chief Assassin to The Sinister (Cargo, 1994 - Geffen, 1995) with their sleazy tempos and their eccentric arrangements (Jim French lends a hand). Shang Vs Hanger starts out as noir/jazz with middle-esastern accents and a bagpipe droning in the background. The refrain is pinned to a noisy crescendo while the vocals are ripped by angst and chased by a gothic choir.
Aqua-Magnetic (eight minutes) first induces psychedelic trance by dilating a sleepy voodoobilly, and later reprises the vocal melody in a poppier form, almost a Nirvana spoof. The Pixies- Replacement- Nirvana axis also inspires 97-MT, augmented with visceral drumming and strumming. The slow, tortured opening of Chenjesu scavenges the human psyche and accelerates to another stormy Nirvana-style power refrain, but then folds back into a sparse litany. The playing is certainly not virtuoso-grade. It's the dynamics of their interplay that matters. Harmony is full of tension and depth.
The instrumental scores often recall the stark, obscure, mathematical, understated dynamics of bands like Slint and Don Caballero, notably Circumcised. Chief Assassin to The Sinister is a Pere Ubu-style cabaret number with drunken piano chords, light percussion and toy trumpet. Long, agonizing, solemn, dejected tracks like X-Miner (nine minutes) sound more like howling to the moon during a shaman's ceremony than like songs. This method leads to the ten-minute psychodrama of Androsyn Guardian.
Compared with the first album, this is a work of much greater ambition. As a matter of fact, the two albums have little in common. The second one has largely dispensed with the musical roots of the duo.

The much more relaxed Another Desert Another Storm (Cargo, 1997), that marks the arrival of keyboardist Tobias Nathaniel, leaves behind the angular rhythms, the convoluted harmony and the dark atmosphere of the previous albums. Jenkins sounds absent-minded and confused, possibly because his mind is elsewhere. Some of the songs even have a pop feeling (Way Of The Ocean, reminiscent of Apples In Stereo, The Year Of No Light, reminiscent of Elton John). The skills of the band as crafters of rabid emotions are still visible in the tense psychodrama of Kill The Race Horse, punctuated by chaos and distortion, in the intermittently trancey and desperate Ruin, in the bluesy and harrowing City Of Bones, the magniloquent piano-driven dirge South, and the seven-minute accordion-based funereal lament One False Eye.

Three Mile Pilot then released a series of singles: This Divine Crown (Goldenrod, 1997), Piano Plus Piano Minus (Pennyfarthing, 1997), Red Sensing (Outer Universe Research, 1997), Late Night In The City Of Jodoolestan (Move Sounds, 1997), The House Is Loss (Paralogy, 1998), later collected on the double-disc anthology Songs From An Old Town We Once Knew (Cargo, 1999), together with assorted rarities and unreleased tracks.

Their career ended with the EP Gravity (1998) that contains On a Ship to Bangladesh.

Black Heart Procession is singer Pall Jenkins and keyboardist Tobias Nathaniel who in 1997 took a break from Three Mile Pilot and hired drummer Mario Rubalcaba to record a set of melancholy, funereal tunes, sparely arranged with analogue keyboards, evocative guitars, xylophone, trumpet (Jason Crane of Rocket From The Crypt), and even a saw. 1 (Cargo, 1997) is sung in a drunken, disconsolate mood and played in a subdued, nocturnal tone. Skeletal lullabies like Old Kind Of Summer and Stitched To My Heart spin tales of moral, philosophical and personal heartbreak in the tradition of Jacques Brel and Tom Waits.

2 (Touch & Go, 1999) is even darker, creepier and wearier. unnerving A whisper in the wind carries The Waiter #2. Solemn accordion, waltzing pump organ and elegiac trumpet propel Blue Tears. An operatic narration a` la Nick Cave lifts A Light So Dim as much as the pounding, procession-like drums and the plaintive piano motive. But the nightmare intensifies with Gently Off The Edge, a deranged, romantic wail wrapped in radio noises and lulled by a mechanic piano figure.
A tad of magniloquence surfaces as the piano-driven rhapsody My Heart Might Stop conjures memories of mournful Queen at the opera. The tension accumulated over the course of the album is released in the hard-rocking Beneath The Ground.
A lengthy The Waiter #3 conceptually crowns the album by reprising some of the (lyrical and musical) themes in the most agonizing tone, albeit with an undercurrent of circus music and a coda of ghastly noises.
Only a couple of tracks escape the depressed mood: It's A Crime I Never Told You About The Diamonds In Your Eyes careens with honky-tonking piano and Warren Zevon punch; the drums-less folk ballad Your Church Is Red recalls Bob Dylan with Al Kooper on organ. Jenkins and Nathaniel have positively created a new form of existential ballad, that transcends the abused stereotypes of Nick Drake, Tim Buckley and Nick Cave.

Pinback (Ace Fu, 1999) is a collaboration between Smith and Rob Crow of Thingy.

A crisper production and more fluent guitar and piano playing infuse 3 (Touch & Go, 2000) with a southern gothic feeling that stresses the similarities with Nick Cave, particularly in We Always Knew (fatalistic vocals, martial pace and mystical organ lines) in the stomping Waterfront (that reprises A Light So Dim with an almost horrific penchant) and in Once Said At The Fires, that comes through more a magic formula than the blues it was intended to be. The Tom Waits-inflections are hardly audible anymore (perhaps in the tender Till We Have To Say Goodbye). On the other hand, occasionally the music is suspended in an ether that is hardly musical, like in the hypnotic lullaby Guess I'll Forget You, which is part Leonard Cohen and part Tibetan mantra.
The moment of relief comes, again, in the form of a honky-tonking novella, A Heart Like Mine. And the closing statement is entrusted to the marching spiritual On Ships Of Gold.
The trumpet and the keyboards are better assimilated in the overall sound, thereby injecting a forceful pulse in the band's litanies and wrapping them in a compact texture. Somehow, though, the more refined sound detracts from the previous album's naked agony.

The singles Between The Machines (Suicide Squeeze, 2001) and Love Sings A Sunrise (Rocker Racer, 2001) are further evidence of the band's skills in crafting noir atmospheres.

Tropics Of Love, which opens Amore Del Tropico (Touch & Go, 2002), mainly proved the suspicion that BHP were merely Nick Cave clones, as did Sympathy Crime a little later. Jenkins (who now goes by the name of Paulo Zappoli) and Nathaniel finally finalized a line-up, with drummer Joe Plummer and bassist Dimitri Dziensuwski, and titled an album. Unfortunately, they also grafted strong Brazilian and cocktail-lounge affectations onto the BHP sound, thus lending it an embarrassing retro-chic quality (Why I Stay, Only One Way). With the exception of the spectral The Waiter #4, of the oddly sinister novelty Fingerprints and of the desolate lament The One Who Has Disappeared (three gems that don't even seem to belong here), pretty much all the songs displayed a kitsch component that defused (rather than enhancing) the experiment, whether the film-noir atmosphere of The Invitation, the martial refrain of Did You Wonder, the Wall-period Pink Floyd chorus of Before The People, or even the six-minute violin-driven waltz of A Cry For Love. Thus this sounded mostly like a lighter, faster, simpler version of BHP, proving that reaching maturity is not always a good sign.

The four-track EP Hearts and Tanks (Shingle Street, 2003) is an exercise in abstract melancholy.

Jenkins and Nathaniel retooled Black Heart Procession's arsenal of gothic atmospheres, kitschy melodies and decadent cabaret overtones for the better balanced The Spell (Touch & Go, 2006), an album that featured ex-Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer as well as two Album Leaf members, bassist Jimmy Lavelle and violinist Matt Resovich. Not only where the songs generally more accomplished, but they finally emancipated themselves from Nick Cave's reference model.
The album opens with the vortex of Tangled, with Jenkins' hymn-like singing climbing at martial rhythm out of the depths created by Jenkins' hypnotic guitar riff and Nathaniel's Bach-ian organ melody. A similar pattern of baroque melody and post-psychedelic trance permeates Places, a stately country-like dirge, To Bring You Back, a waltz-like descent into lovely despair, and even Not Just Words, although at a lively, almost boogie pace, They are all architected for minimal emotional impact. The arrangements are not only subtle but also more eclectic than they sound on the surface. There is a neoclassical piano, violin and cello-like guitar sonata underlying the tender The Letter. The Replacement presents Jenkins as a Phil Collins-esque balladeer, but his aggressive guitar strumming, his ghostly synthesizer, Rosevich's sensual violin phrasing and Nathaniel's slow-motion piano counterpoint create a claustrophobic mood. The instrumental counterpoint can be disorienting and depressing. The spare, hallucinated agony of Return to Burn sounds like a cross between Chris Isaak and Pink Floyd. The lullaby The Waiter #5 sinks into a plasma of melancholy piano notes and ominous electronics. On the other hand, the swirling sermon of The Spell, fueled by the contrast between Resovich's relentless violin beat and Nathaniel's dreamy guitar tones, could fit well on Nick Cave's Good Son. While apparently uniform, the album experiments with both spare and dense attangements. Its spectrum of colors ranges from almost orchestral to almost skeletal.

The austere chamber dirges of Black Heart Procession's Six (Temporary Residence, 2009) were perhaps a bit too uniform, with multi-instrumentalist Tobias Nathaniel (Suicide aside) wasting his enormous talent in trying to stick to the band's aesthetic manifesto.

Meanwhile, Three Mile Pilot reunited for The Inevitable Past Is The Future Forgotten (Temporary Residence Limited, 2010), a collection of dark tunes arranged with keyboards. The bouncy opener Battle, with its echoes of the 1960s, is misleading. Starting with the desolate chamber ballad a` la REM Still Alive, the album is a steady descent into some kind of personal hell via the slow and gloomy Grey Clouds, the danceable and languid Same Mistake, the Leonard Cohen imitation What I Lose, the slow waltz One Falls Away and so forth. Way too little to capture one's attention.