3 Black Heart Procession Touch & Go, 2000 Tracks 1: We Always Knew 2: Guess I'll Forget You 3: Once Said At The Fires 4: Waterfront (The Stinking Road) 5: Till We Have To Say Goodbye 6: I Know Your Ways 7: Never From This Heart 8: Heart Like Mine 9: The War is Over 10: On Ships of Gold Reviewed by Ian Grey Buy it online	Besides boasting great songs sung and played with an degree of intentional acuity, truly great pop records gain their obsessive appeal because they are more than simple replications of a musical event. They are portals to a sonic world that only exists in the recording, a one-off fantasy accessible nowhere else. Black Heart Procession's 3 is a great pop record. You could place 3 somewhere between The Bad Seeds and Jacques Brel and be more than alphabetically close to what the band sounds like. But only close. Yes, there's a tinge of Bad Seed Southern gothic, along with the classic Brel's theatrically gloomy chord progressions, but BHP add another dimension that, again, all great pop records have: ambiance. An intractable sense of location. In the sense that this record was recorded in some unreachable, and in this case, very distressed place. A Weimar Republic cabaret before The Fall; a Beat poetry meeting before a bad bust; an isolated studio where the lead singer hangs himself after the final mix. Images run rife with this music, courtesy the ambient "placement" of each song in some ineffably desolate and emotionally wrenching "space" via the use of darkly e.q'ed reverbs and subliminal, nearly invisible washes of sound. On repeat listening, this attention to detail is astonishing (but never showy). Instrumentally, BHP are a simple assemblage of multi-dubbed piano, B3, drums, bass and semi-oddities such as electric saw and assorted ominous samples. If vocalist Pall A. Jenkins' voice were to be played by an actor, it would probably be Montgomery Clift. Jenkins' voice is a boyishly handsome tenor instrument that unassumingly evokes an almost preternatural sense of unbearable loss. Lyrically, words like "wander," "sinking," "heart" and "crime" are often juxtaposed, with the effect being purposefully vague. Black Heart Procession is inviting you to take an extended look at stuff you usually spend a lot of energy avoiding. This is not an easy CD to listen to. Its pitch-black mood, rather like Lou Reed's Berlin, is infectious. But it's really not like Berlin at all, or anything else you've heard. Great records are like that too. | October 2000 Ian Grey's work has been published in Time Out, Icon, Fangoria and many other periodicals. 1998 saw the publication of his book, Sex, Stupidity and Greed: Inside the American Movie Industry (JunoBooks). He is currently at work on an epic novel dealing with sex, pop music, family and mass murder, based on two lines from a mediocre Depeche Mode song. Mr. Grey likes to think that he will be among the very first to do this.	Images run rife with this music, courtesy the ambient "placement" of each song in some ineffably desolate and emotionally wrenching "space" via the use of darkly e.q'ed reverbs and subliminal, nearly invisible washes of sound. On repeat listening, this attention to detail is astonishing (but never showy).