"Written recorded and performed by Boris Skalsky," reads the top-line credit in the CD booklet for the debut album by Dead Heart Bloom, which should clear up the question of who the real artist is. Skalsky was the singer, bassist, and keyboard player in Phaser, and although he has employed his former bandmate Paul Wood to play guitar on three tracks, used a couple of drummers on different songs, and written some parts for the Sunrise Quartet to play, Dead Heart Bloom is actually a solo project in everything but name. As is often the case when a former group member breaks out on his own, the album serves as a means for him to demonstrate the variety of his talents, not only for writing, singing, playing a variety of instruments, engineering, and arranging, but also for creating music in many different styles. Much of the disc, beginning with the introductory statement "Listen," is soft and acoustic, with delicate guitar playing or lush strings (such as in "I Hope I Stop Fading"), in which Skalsky voices doubts and emotional vulnerability. But then there are rough-edged rockers with noisy guitar lines like "Sodom" and "The Marchers Are Coming" that feature lyrics tinged with bitterness. "I won't let them hang me, ma," Skalsky vows in "The Marchers Are Coming," and in "Sodom" he reaches back to biblical imagery, recalling, "When the whores left Sodom for the Promised Land, they never looked back to wonder why." (If that's his metaphor for the breakup of Phaser, it must have been anything but amicable.) And there are also the sound collage instrumentals "Transfiguration" and "Transmigration," plus a slow, moody revival of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" in which the train rolls not to San Antonio, but instead to "Kingdom Come." That's the gloomiest moment on the album, but not the only one, by any means. As the name Dead Heart Bloom indicates, Skalsky is interested in issues of death and rebirth on his debut solo album, and he demonstrates enough ability to awaken interest in what he will do once he gets his recent troubles behind him.
© William Ruhlmann /TiVo