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Coming to Terms With Coming Apart: Captain Black Heart By Geoff Baker www.soundsugar.net

After being introduced by a mutual friend, songwriters Dino Malito and Erwin Herceg first collaborated in Serum, a melodic hard-rock band that was signed to Santa Monica’s Brick Red Records. About a year after the band ceased working together, Dino and Erwin reconnected and ran through some musical ideas. The chemistry was immediate and inspirational. Malito’s music was a perfect vehicle for Herceg’s singing and lyrics, and, more generally, their attitudes and outlooks on life proved compatible. As Erwin recalls, “I went to Dino’s just to hang out one Friday night and didn’t come home until Sunday.” Soon the duo, calling themselves Captain Black Heart, got down to business with “Needle,” an arresting tale of euphoric but self-destructive love. A self-titled EP followed that featured Herceg’s plaintive voice delivering his introspective lyrics over Malito’s multilayered, dreamlike compositions.

On “Needle,” a reedy tenor in the neighborhood of Jon Anderson or John Wetton joins the opening marriage of acoustic guitar and sustained, subdued organ chords, guiding the listener through a pastiche of sounds both new and reminiscent of the progressive rock of the early 1970s. Following the first chorus, processed voices drift into the mix and blend with the mellifluous analog-synth foundation, creating a moody, schizophrenic tug-of-war redolent of Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd.

I hate to beat the Floyd comparison to death, but Malito’s pitch-bending solo that follows the second chorus achieves a tonal quality and emotional resonance similar to the work of David Gilmour; Herceg even bears a passing physical resemblance to the guitar god. This is not to take away from the originality of Captain Black Heart, who have obviously found a formula whereby they have forged their own distinct identity while retaining some of the style and ideas of the pioneers of experimental rock. On the contrary, their willingness to embrace their influences without becoming lost in or bogged down by them exhibits a mature, confident approach to their craft.

Other tracks on Captain Black Heart include the calming, major-seventh-and-falsetto–drenched “Once for a Change”; the uplifting, melodic “Flying Skeletons”; and “Bomb Shelter,” a slow rocker that features contributions on bass from Juan Aldrete of indie favorites The Mars Volta. “Bomb Shelter” is a showcase for all of Captain Black Heart’s strengths: pensive, philosophical lyrics; beautiful, lilting vocal and instrumental melodies; use of found sounds; thick but clean production; and a nagging feeling of unease that lasts after the last note dies out. Indeed, as the final wavering siren sound is left to dissolve into the ether, nearly a full minute of this track is given over to an unadorned field recording of a rainstorm, as if to remind the listener that it’s a harsh world out there after all. Captain Black Heart stands as a cohesive and eloquent artistic statement, a mirror of a fragmented world; it is a guidebook for making sense of the senseless calamities and impulses that befall and betray us.