Perhaps their best work to date, The Black Heart Procession's fourth album, Amore del Tropico is an impressive collection of brooding and macabre songs of love and loss that defies traditional notions of independent rock.

A prayer for the potentially dying, that's what "Yesterday Once More" was - an extremely political song when you think about it. "Every sha-la-la-la..." as if they are desperately clutching at signifiers like a lifebelt. This all still means something, DOESN'T IT? TELL ME IT DOES!

It's also yet another album that is going to make my always-difficult year-end best-of list an even more obsessive and solipsistic exercise this year than it is by definition. Never mind what I wanted this album to sound like, I'm mesmerized by what it does. Finding ways for minimalism to progress, if the unscientific survey of bands I like who have tried it is at all representative, is extremely hard. ... This is one of the lost records Nick Drake never made, or Richard Shindell crossed with Jeff Buckley, or what Chris Whitley might have done without such deep blues roots, Richard Thompson without folk stature and guitar virtuosity as crutches, Steve Earle without prison or drink.

The band should be proud of Yanqui U.X.O. -- it proves that they're not hopelessly married to the fine-print details of their formula, and that they can still wring fresh ideas from familiar territory.

The reissue boasts an hour and a half of extra material that tidily compiles the band's post-"Slanted.." activity, including the "Watery Domestic" EP.