Love and heartbreak, sex and death, highs and comedowns. The duality of life’s most intense aspects of being human inspire the best art. Infiltrating our hearts and resonating with our own experiences, it’s what we dig about music. Melody or lyrical expression, people love to relate, to have your own emotions captured and expressed in art form by another soul to know you’re not alone. There’s the light messages of life’s little joys and complaints pumped out by the pop power houses, and then there’s the real shit. “Black Heart,” off Brian Robert’s EP Feels Like I’m Gonna Die is the real shit. The lead singer/songwriter of the Charleston band Company, friends and favorites of their neighbors Band of Horses, Robert spread his wings to fly solo in the sadness of the death of his childhood best friend and Company costar Kelly Grant. So, when he titles his first EP post-tragedy Feels Like I’m Gonna Die you get the impression he isn’t mincing words or using the concept of death for shock value. These songs are coming from his deep black lake of a heart, picturesque on the surface but churning with life and all of its cruelties below. “Black Heart,” with its (my favorite expression) beautifully morbid melodies doesn’t have soul searching lyrics, it has soul revealing lyrics.
Stream (or download!) “Black Heart” via Bandcamp below.
