The Court and Spark - Hearts

Genre rock Publisher Absolutely Kosher External Links Official The Court and Spark Website Official Absolutely Kosher Website

The path of slowcore has been a long and arduous one, but it should come as no surprise to anyone that it ultimately leads back to country music, for it is with country (and its high lonesome cousin, bluegrass) that the deepest veins of emotion are found. Also, nobody yells at country musicians for sitting down during a performance - the Scud Mountain Boys used to sit around a table for their early shows. So at least we can blame Joe Pernice for something. But I digress.

Anyhow, the Manifest Destiny of slowcore is now complete, as its greatest exponents more often than not hail from California. (Sorry, Low, you lost your title when you got Albini to produce Secret Name. These things happen.) San Francisco band the Court and Spark and San Diego's Black Heart Procession represent a timeline of sorts. Hearts is the fifth album for the Court and Spark, who have continued plowing the moody alt-country field they started with. The Black Heart Procession have made a stunning leap sideways; The Spell is the most straightforward thing they've done yet. Where is the musical saw?

I guess the idea behind the Black Hearts' new-and-improved stripped-down sound is to show that they can bring the tuneage whether or not the traditional atmospherics of slowcore are in place. They are, for the most part. "Not Just Words" shows a fury heretofore unheard 'cause of all the layers of effects. And "GPS" is the album's centerpiece and mission statement-uptempo with riffs and that all-too-obvious hope-you-like-our-new-direction title. To be fair, though, it's not so much a new direction as a loud direction, and I'm just old.

Which is where the Court and Spark comes in. I have never heard a band so young sound so authentically burdened, and not just with regular my-lady-dumped-me stuff. Singer M.C.Taylor sounds as if he's carrying three generations worth of unalloyed pain in his voice. This band is slow 'cause he has to drag all of that pain with him and they can't go any faster. Probably. At any rate, Taylor's voice is a wonderfully nuanced instrument, making lyrics like "I met you at the change of the century" sound not so irritating, and giving a three-dimensional quality to the clearly commitment-phobic protagonist of "Let's Get High". Even the alt-country turf war Taylor describes in "We Were All Uptown Rulers" is made believable by the slightly distracted quality of his voice, as if it still hurts too much to describe in detail what happened. "Hey/Cryer's ringing his bell/Uptown rulers shot down/oh, there's snow on the ground," he sings, and you can see him turn his face away from the spectacle.

There are little eruptions of rock throughout Hearts, as if the band isn't quite sure how to maintain the atmosphere they've built up during the songs' verses, so they end up with little clattering interstitials that do nothing. The momentum the band builds up in the songs, however glacial, is no less effective, and is ruined by the thoughtless placement of instruments. Which is not to say that The Court and Spark are not brilliant. Given their slow and steady development, I fully expect their next album to be freaking slit-your-wrists fantastic.

That paradoxical lack of multi-layered, effects-driven immediacy is what irrationally disappointed me about The Spell. It just means a)change is often necessary, but that b)I'll be listening to Hearts more often when I'm drunk and maudlin.