For the majority of his career, Brock van Wey has plowed a pretty consistent furrow; almost all his work as bvdub conforms to a relatively rigid template. What makes him stand apart is the deeply personal and emotional nature of his music. Much ambient music is little more than beautiful aural wallpaper to send you off to sleep. There's nothing wrong with that, but bvdub goes above and beyond, bringing to the music a very human component, a yearning melancholy, and an immersive physicality. It has the same warm lulling effect as other good ambient, but it touches what might be called, for want of a better word, "the soul" in ways that others do not. To say that all of the tracks on this album follow essentially the same pattern is in no way a slight -- pretty much every track bvdub has ever done follows the same pattern, but it never gets stale. What makes this album different from the rest of his oeuvre (and perhaps even "more ambient," if such a thing were possible) is its complete lack of beats of any kind. Highlights are hard to pick on an album like this, but opener "Sleepless" must be one: liturgical chants echo in a cavernous space, and synth pads build to a dense weight before dropping out entirely to be replaced by a looped, reverberant piano motif that seems to offer a kind of bittersweet hope. "Nameless" is like sinking in a tropical sea, the pressure gradually building, soulful vocal samples echoing into incomprehensibility. The heartbreaking melancholy that "Limitless" evokes, simply through a pattern of a few repeated notes, is testament to van Wey's skill and a convincing justification for his having honed it over all these years while making lots of tracks that all sound pretty similar. "Dreamless" sounds like an eternal intro to a lush pop/R&B ballad that never actually emerges, while the mournful closing title track leads one through sadness to a sense of resigned acceptance. The aerial view of the snowbound forest on the album's cover is a perfect metaphor for this music; bvdub's work has always suggested majestic natural landscapes whose immensity engulfs the listener, and this time is no different. Heartless is one of van Wey's most immersive and emotionally involving albums, standing with the likes of Return to Tonglu, The First Day, and Tribes at the Temple of Silence in the upper echelon of his extensive -- and impressive -- discography.