“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. “

(‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe 1845)

Last year’s Six confirmed what many had long suspected about San Diego’s Black Heart Procession, despite 2002′s delightfully theatrical Amore Del Tropico, a murder mystery romp set to latin lounge music and blues, the band seems much more at home inside the narrative of a Poe novel or on the set of some apocalyptic sci-fi horror-Fritz Lang epic. Their last full-length album twinned themes of loss and heartache with starkly haunting and beautifully orchestrated vignettes. With a mood and intensity almost cinematic in scope, it was hard to imagine a band more comfortable with the idea of staring into the abyss, any doubts firmly laid to rest by singer Pall Jenkins’ in the opening lines to ‘When You Finish Me’, tinkling fairytale-like piano, sparse and heatbroken:

“When you’re through with me / When your heart aches / When your head spins / When you tempt me / When you finish me/When you cut me/When you kill me”

The bleak lyrics seem to portray life as a series of unfortunate events, a theme running right through the Black Heart Procession’s work since their debut in 1998, simply named 1. The ever-present danger of self-parody this creates has been saved to some extent by the band’s music which often hints at much more. The ambition of Amore Del Tropico was scaled down for 2006′s darkly majestic The Spell , but Jenkins and mainstay cohort Tobias Nathaniel have used their compositional skills and perserverence in the studio to craft ever-more expansive sounds, and infuse the slow-burning doomladen numbers of old with dub and electronic experimentation. Certainly in evidence on Six, and now these ideas are extended in exciting new directions on their latest EP Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit, a 40-minute continuous player built on 3 new songs and remixes of the recent material.

‘Heaven and Hell’, ‘Suicide’ and ‘Drugs’ are all given the remix treatment to good effect here. The former is now ‘Heaven Below’ and lends itself perfectly to some dark driving dub “riddims”, with reverb-heavy drum and fat bass, mixed with Nathaniel’s trademark creepy organ and Jenkins vocals reduced to just a dying whisper. ‘Suicide’ has been twisted into the dark acid-tripping ‘Silence’, a track now bristling with crackles and paranoid screams of distortion, set amidst metal-pounding factory noises and a dark industrial intensity. Jenkins himself handles the mixing desk for these, working under the alias Mr Tube, but perhaps the greatest triumph is reserved for back-to-back remixes of ‘Drugs’ which wind up the ep. The lyrical content hardly stretches any new ground:

“I took your poison to see how you suffered/and I took your drugs to see you high/and I took your hand to walk with you/and I lost my mind to lose my love”.

Probably the sort of thing Johnny Cash would knock up in his sleep, but Temporary Residence label mate and ambient minimalist Eluvium extends the song to 9 minutes and gives it such a remote and icy cool, you hardly notice it’s there until the song is ingeniously brought back to life by San Diego producers Jamuel Saxon’s ‘extension’ remix, now shaping it into a low-tempo dancefloor number, trancelike.

The drugs don’t always work though. It’s quite hard to see where the song ‘Wasteland’ and the freak-out mix that is ‘Freeze’ actually meet. Lee Scratch Perry’s contribution to ‘Blood Bunny’ is to say the least a curiosity, and Jenkins and Nathaniel’s relief palpable when they get their hands back on the controls!

While at times wilfully uncommercial and experimental, Six may have been the Black Heart Procession’s most fully realized work to date, and a clear signal their dark marching days are far from over. Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit is a brief feel-good offering, extending some of the recent work but leaving others to decide where it goes, coherent enough and revealing of a band relaxed in possible new directions.

Bloodless songs brought back from the dead with electronica and dub “riddims”? Well possibly, but the new songs in this collection also offer a clue to where Messrs. Jenkins and Nathaniel might take us next. ‘Blank page’ is to be fair almost certainly a prelude to something else. ‘The orchid’, however, is certainly from the band’s top drawer of haunting melodies, and ‘Devotion’ steps up the tempo, a possible contender for a single. Now all this leads me to speculate: Is Blood Bunny just a great smokescreen, a gentle tease behind which the band will reveal Amore Del Tropico II, maestro … watch this space everybody!