Six

New Black Heart Procession albums have always been a delicate proposition, like inviting the devil over for tea or literally cracking Pandora's Box in your living room. After all, very few indie-rock vets make dreadful tales of death and damnation as palpable as the Procession. That's certainly the case here, as the band raises the curtain on a conceptual and literal continuation of their first three full-lengths. Like those sequentially numbered LPs, Six is spare but undeniably spooky, drawing most of its spine-tingling power from co-founders/multi-instrumentalists Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel. Gone — for the most part, at least — are the clanging guitars of 2006's The Spell. In their place: prickly piano progressions ("When You Finish Me," "Liar's Ink"), grimy organ rolls ("Heaven and Hell"), and speaker-panning synths, as drowned by a sea of distortion and galloping grooves ("Suicide"). None of which comes off as campy or calculated. Nope, this is pure melancholia — music that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the last musty, sustained note of "Iri Sulu."