Dead Heart Bloom – Chelsea Diaries

Dead Heart Bloom is the one-man music project of New York-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Boris Skalsky (formerly of the band Phaser). Dead Heart Bloom’s self-titled debut was a musically-varied, lyrics-based foray into the nature of life, death, and rebirth (even the “band” name reflects this cycle), and Chelsea Diaries continues to question the meaning of our existence on a more ambitious, yet intimate scale.

Running a compact 24 minutes, this album is far-reaching in its thematic elements, complex lyric content, and focus on a particular style of sound, but personal in its evocation of a specific time period, milieu, and viewpoint.

The series of story-telling vignettes reference 1960s-era USA in the lyrics (story-teller mode, the young man from the small town moving to the big city) and sound (layered vocal harmonies, strummed guitars, tambourine, handclaps), all the while bringing up the “big questions” that we all ask ourselves at some point in our lives: questions about faith and belief (in spirituality, not religious institutions), questions about the purpose to life, and the ever-elusive question of life (or at least a continuing spirit) after death.

The lyrics are heavy, man, but not preachy. Boris (well, his alter ego on this album) is still searching for the meaning of life and we’re right there with him, going on the journey.

The opener “Who Will You Love” is an up-tempo number, with fast-strummed guitar, low-key verses, and upbeat, revival-like choruses, complete with handclaps, tambourine, and harmonizing vocals. The narrator thinks “…back to them New York City nights when we were wild and free of faith…”, then wickedly and ironically asks “Who will you love when you’re gone? When the savior you were promised never comes?”, and the kicker, “When you find yourself in hell…and you belong?”, seeming to question the belief in the institution of religion.

Boris sings in a lower, duskier tone on “Chelsea Song #2”, against repetitive plunked piano notes and guitar lines in the background. His voice is sometimes doubled on the verses and tripled to Queen-like, breathy harmonic intensity on the choruses, giving the song a surround-sound vocal feel.

The vocal tone changes again for “Save the Last Verse For Me”, with Boris singing in a plaintive, higher-pitched voice. The song almost sounds like a stripped down Boo Radleys number, with compact, incisive lyrics, strummed guitar, and contemplative delivery. Boris carries on the grand tradition of the bard, creating a story, a mood, a moment – in this instance of a man looking for salvation. “I guess a man must lose himself to know where he has been” and concludes that “…grieving for your past is no way to live”.

“New York City Heat” changes the pace, sounding very much like The White Stripes – with the Southern blues feel (including a multitude of voices on choruses) and the gritty, nasal vocal delivery. Boris could almost pass for Jack White, at least in attitude, on the line “Nothing in this whole wide world can bring me down…until you come around”, in reference to the bottle (of wine), and not a loved one.

“Someday Soon Our Time Will Come” features a softer, more introspective sound, with Jeff Buckley-like strummed guitars (you can hear fingers brushing over the guitar strings), and Boris singing in a hushed, lighter tone with on ‘n’ off harmonizing vocals that are even higher in register. The subject is, of course, life and death, and the balance of young and old, and how each has its importance – the innocence of youth, the knowledge of age, as evidenced in the lyrics
“Someday our time will come…will we be young enough to yearn and believe?…Will we be old enough to know what it means?”.

The bohemian artist vibe comes out in “Wish It Well” with its familiar upbeat strum of two guitars, tambourine, and maracas-type shaking. This song encapsulates the story of a life – that young man from the small town who moves to the big city and finds love, with Boris sing-talking “New York ain’t no different than the town where I grew up – just a little bit big, and a little bit mean, and the people don’t shut up.”

This next song, “The Love Song You Always Wanted”, is a very short romantic ballad with Boris singing in a lower, smoky register amid bright piano notes, echoed, doubled vocals, and slowly strummed guitars. The song feels slightly out of place on the album because it is strictly a love song and doesn’t probe the issue of life and death per se.

The closer “The Up and Down”, has a rolling strum to the guitar line that is very Mark Kozelek-like, with murmured, slightly hushed vocals, and a chorus with airy, tripled vocal lines – one line being plaintive, the other higher in tone, and the last lower in tone. The chorus is a bit repetitive and, as a summation of the album and as a unifying thread to what has gone before, the success level, lyrics-wise, is questionable. It seems to be a bit too much about drugs ‘n’ drink. To whit, “There’s nothing that the drugs won’t cure, nothing that the drink won’t swallow, nothing that your love won’t kill for good”.

The narrator sings that, even when he’s gone (i.e., dead), he’ll come back to his loved one again “…for I’ll come back to you when I’m through”, bringing up the idea of life after death, of resurrection – or of a spirit form that lives on after the physical form is dead. As Celine Dion once “titanically” sang, the “…heart will go on”. Dead Heart Bloom that is.

Boris’s philosophical, yet dryly and wryly delivered lyrics about being a living entity that must eventually die, but possibly continue on in some other form, and his questions about the meaning of life will make you think long after the disc stops spinning and the music fades to silence.