Black Hoodie Ensemble
HEAVYWEIGHT OUT NOW
Bernard II
Out February 24
Press
V13 // Heavyweight Preview: https://v13.net/2023/01/black-hoodie-ensemble-heavyweight-single-premiere/
Divide and Conquer // Captain Album Review: https://www.divideandconquermusic.com/indie-music-album-reviews/black-hoodie-ensemble-captain
Transcended Music Blog // Captain Album Review: https://www.transcendedmusic.de/2020/10/black-hoodie-ensemble-review/
Captain Album Preview and Artist Interview // https://www.quarterturnrecords.com/captainreview/blog-post-title-one-d463z
About Bernard II
“Black velvet under white sheets”
The tactile line in album opener “Black Flowers” effectively captures the texture of Bernard II as a whole; Lush, enveloping and elegantly designed to make your skin crawl.
Bernard II presents an urgent, rhythm centered approach to post-rock evocative of albums like CAN’s Ege Bamyasi and Swans’ To Be Kind while continuing to build upon the dark soundscapes constructed in Black Hoodie Ensemble’s 2020 album Captain that was praised as “innovative,” “well-produced,” and “more than the sum of its parts.”
Writer, producer and primary musician for Black Hoodie Ensemble, Jet Jobob Rodel, describes Bernard II as his “own personal version of The Twilight Zone”, and the title of the album is a salute to luminary American composer Bernard Hermann who created the original score for the touchstone television series along with numerous paradigmatic suspense classics like Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver.
“Bernard Hermann is a master of mood, and I was listening to his scores for Taxi Driver, Vertigo and Twilight Zone almost exclusively when I was writing the early songs that set the direction for this record” says Rodel. “That and some of the more insidious shit from Pusha T, Schoolboy Q and Griselda.”
Once the Hermann connection has been established it can’t be unheard. Lyrically in the dystopian themes of album opener “Black Flowers” and the playfully ghoulish tale in “Purple Before Midnight,” the atonal minimalism of “Missing Number”, and, most glaringly, in the spacey keyboards, pizzicato strings and lazy droning horns of “Sleepwalking (The Nights Don’t End)”. The fingerprints are everywhere.
If 2020’s Captain was an isolated walk through the woods on a late summer night, Bernard II is a distinctly colder, more metropolitan and paranoid journey. Vast sweeping soundscapes close in to arms length where the persistent driving drums and melodies attempt to infiltrate the listeners deepest thoughts, weaving themselves into their subconscious. These “exhausting grooves” in the words of Rodel are used to great effect on the tracks “Heavyweight” and “The Double” which also features an unexpected, and satisfying verse from Austin rapper Blakchyl.
“I think this will be the weirdest I get for a while” joked Rodel regarding some of the new musical directions and production styles on Bernard II. After the central themes and direction were established, the recording process was markedly different from previous Black Hoodie Ensemble records. Most tracks started with freestyle drum takes from percusionists Matt Judson, Neil Durr and Lemuel Hayes without any song structure or backing tracks at all aside from a metronome keeping time. Then from hundreds of drum takes, samples were pieced together to form a cohesive song structure that Rodel and a number of collaborators could layer additional elements over. While this writing approach is fairly common in modern electronic music and hip-hop production, it’s still quite unorthodox in music with more “traditional rock band” drums, guitar and bass centered instrumentation. “It was more just chopping up drums and putting them back together. Kind of like a puzzle” says Rodel. “I feel it’s just a product of me getting better at mixing and getting what I’m hearing in my head.” says Rodel.
The Black Hoodie Ensemble principle claims his first childhood memory is a dream where a giant version of one of his John Carter toys was trying to kill him, which seems to have been something of an early omen for the Artist. “Things that aren’t quite right always seem to draw me in.” says Rodel. “Thoughtfully strange things like The Twilight Zone, horror and more modern David Lynch have always inspired me. In terms of music, I think the future is Death Grips… Maybe 100 Gecs is the closest to the future we’re going to get… but I also think the world is going to end soon.”
While not all listeners may share the same pessimism on humanity’s imminent doom, most can agree that there are certainly worse soundtracks to imagine it all unraveling to than Bernard II.
About Captain
Texas in late August. After weeks of endlessly sweltering steel blue skies, survival is the highest need you can hope to fulfill. The hostile monotony of the beating sun melts time into stagnation, pooling the days together as your brain bakes inside your skull. The corners of your psyche darken like wax paper in an oven and the heat waves coming off the pavement literally distort reality until it no longer exists. Captain, The 2nd full length release from the Black Hoodie Ensemble, is a dark and beautiful fever dream set in the peak of this late Summer daze.
Captain takes a journey from a heat headache through complete mental detachment and back to post stroke sanity over a lush sonic landscape that spans transcendental psych rock, danceable pop, and symphonic post rock.
Album opener “The Taker” sets off with the warning that, “Trouble’s on the Way.” The heavy foreboding crawl boils into an incendiary guitar solo that gives way to grief stricken trumpets heralding the pain ahead. In “Ode to Summer” the self-aware beginnings of the plunge into the seasonal mania kick off the sinful transformation of the dusk into the night that “Red Lights” takes over in the most upbeat and accessible track of the record, narrating an evening of self-destructive debauchery and the decisions forced in its wake.
Captain reaches its early climax, and most defining minutes in “Bathroom Fight Song” with a maniacal monologue one could imagine coming from Johnny Smith, the cursed clairvoyant, in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone when he is finally able to live out his ultimate question, “If you could go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?” The driving stereo congas and drums from Pat Devaney and Taylor Barham respectively build to a breaking point over a hair raising bass triad. The result is a spiraling descent into a fiery abyss that makes you question your own decency for enjoying the ride.
“Gnaw Job” follows with a driving psych rock groove; the soundtrack to a final showdown with a forgone conclusion. After all, you can’t beat crazy. The dust settles on “What Goes There” revealing the death rattles of evil incarnated as the frantic guitar work of collaborator Justin Cox.
“May Queen” brings the first light of the morning, the reality of the sins that preceded and a reluctant acceptance of the atonement that must now take place. A chromatically descending guitar line and clear, strong voice step up to address their judge and recount the honest truth of what transpired, no matter the consequence.
“There is a darkness that’s growing
Blacker than I’ve ever known
I long for days when the sun shines
There’s no way to know
which way the wind blows
Until you’re stripped naked and bare
Your only protection
Your perfect complexion
Under the midsummer air
Throw me down into the roses
After we dance to your song”
As a whole, Captain is an ambitious, sonically diverse follow up to The Black Hoodie Ensemble’s debut album, 2am Inferno, that paradoxically is best defined by its focused tone. Black Hoodie Ensemble is the amorphous musical project of songwriter and primary musician Jet Rodel. Inspired by what he calls “moody” albums like Hex by Bark Psychosis and Laughing Stock by Talk Talk, Rodel set the guiding principle of “darkness” before starting any writing for the record which began in early 2019. In an ironic twist of fate, the global pandemic that pressed pause on so much of the world actually fast tracked the completion of this record as the studio work and producing gigs Rodel had lined up all but vanished. Rodel recorded, mixed and mastered the entire record at DUP studios in Burnet, Texas and it’s safe to assume the record wouldn’t have ended up the way it did under “normal” circumstances. Studio time, newly available musician friends who would have otherwise been out touring and a deep well of darkness and loss to pull from during social distancing all brought this album to term faster than Rodel ever expected.
Living in the sleepy highland lakes town of Marble Falls outside of Austin, Texas and working in the ranchette turned home studio that is DUP studios show themselves in the spacious and unhurried pace of the record. Nearly half of the songs are over 5 and a half minutes long and as much care seems to be paid to what isn’t there as what is. Rodel stacks layer on top of layer into a mountain of sound on tracks like“The Taker” and “What GoesThere,” but shows considerable restraint on much of “May Queen” and “Ode to Summer.”
The end result is a contrasting collection of complimentary songs that’s more than the sum of its parts. Captain’s 7 tracks inspire listeners to lean in, listen close and take notice.