Dead Heart Bloom as a band name also describes the album tempo and emotional arc—from the deadened acoustic introspection of track 1 (“Listen”) with its Joseph Arthur-esque timbre to the blooming Britrock funk of track 2 (“Sodom”) with its hints of industrial keyboards.
This back and forth between the dead and the bloom puts the album’s arc on an art-pop path which is overdone since as Gregory Hudson’s drum kick up that beat on “Sodom” and the Sunrise Quartet slide their bows in jazzy waves, you want track 3 to take you to the next step. Instead, track 3 (“I Hope I Stop Fading”) is a dead—dragging the pond—interlude. Dave Matthews Band uses such pieces to cleanse the palette in between the diverse tracks of Before These Crowded Streets, but the dead track for Dead Heart Bloom leave the tongue dying for a taste.
I’m all for album composition—overall a lost art—but when “Sodom” is such an infectious rhythm, it’s hard to have none of that carried over into “I Hope I Stop Fading,” which is like a Burt Bacharach tune that’s been wallowing in a 5 AM bleariness. The infectious rhythms don’t come back until five minutes and thirty seconds later on track 4 (“The Marchers are Coming”) with its foreboding marching band parading through that industrial dance light.
With these reservation, there’s still an artistry here in Boris Skalsky’s music that is so strong that it grabs you tight—whether on a dead or a bloom track. Just listen to the creepy deadened treatment of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and you’ll know exactly why that whistle blowing made the character downright murderous again.
Back to “Sodom” (something I doubt anyone usually says in their travels), it’s one of those songs worth exploring for its use of biblical imagery, a reference to the shame involved in the book of Genesis account of the apparent homosexual intentions of the Sodomites. Other spiritual themes abound on tracks like “Transfiguration,” “Saint Henry” (is someone who commits suicide also considered a saint?), and “New Messiah.” I would even conjecture that the name Dead Heart Bloom is itself an explanation of what Christ does for us—taking our dead hearts and making them alive again.
Thank you to Dead Heart Bloom and KEI Records for the review copy.
