The Black Heart Procession at Casbah

Some bands belong to a city the way fog belongs to a coastline. This one is San Diego's, and has been since the late-nineties underground, when they and Three Mile Pilot quietly decided what this town sounded like after midnight — mournful piano, a singing saw, songs that move at the speed of a bad night. They do not play often. When they do it at the Casbah, the little room on Kettner where half this city's music history actually happened, it stops being a concert and becomes a reunion of everyone who was there plus everyone who wishes they had been. The songs are heavy and slow and beautiful, the kind you feel behind your sternum rather than in your ears. The lifers still have the seven-inches in a milk crate somewhere. Twenty-one and over. Send this to the person you used to drive around with at two in the morning.