The Black Heart Procession

How long can one nurse a broken heart before the healing just has to kick in? In the case of the Black Heart Procession, almost a decade. For the past nine years, frontman Pall Jenkins has led his San Diego-based, indie brood-rock band through haunted down-tempo odes to what novelist Andrew Sean Greer calls, "a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love." Jenkins' poetry is slightly more prosaic on "Tangled," the lead track off the group's moving sixth album Spell, where he moans: "Trapped in your web I'll always be ... Tangled in my heart you will stay." But despite the lyrical cliches, the BHP's songs are ultimately persuasive, due in no small part to Jenkins' sad-boy vocals, the piano's midnight-dark minor chords, and the prevalent three-quarters (waltz time) meter, as if dancing with the corpse of lost love somehow makes the sorrow bearable. As if.