It really is kind of amazing how goddamn cunning the human heart is - not the organ, mind you - but the fictitious concept of the heart as a thinking and acting object, capable of rampant destruction and the sorts of nose-bleed, giggle fest highs that are impossible to find elsewhere. Oh, it's very cunning. It's really amazing that there is never any gain involved with the perspective of getting down to brass tacks with it, of feeling like there is any headway being made in its study. But it's just where we tend to leave ourselves, staggering and mumbling to ourselves - still without a stitch of sureness, with a wandering echo inside that we take as the beat of that lovely pump. It's a beat, and often a hollow one, that we convince ourselves is a necessity, a mark of still being alive, as the Tin Man noted, finally knowing that he had a heart for he could feel it breaking under the strain of sadness. Minneapolis band Dark Dark Dark has a new record called "Wild Go," that takes us into more of those dark spaces of the heart where we're left punching the air, getting dizzy on the intoxicating fallibility of humans holding other humans and of humans doing such things for any length of time, without finding any ways to escape the clutches of suffocation or some form of a death or an ending. We're still stunted by love's powers and, almost hand-in-hand, the powers that a good lonesomeness can bring on. For the thinker and the believer, love and lonesomeness are such close cousins that it doesn't really matter too much and Dark Dark Dark are thinkers and believers to that line. Nona Marie Invie, Marshall LaCount, Todd Chandler and Jonathan Kaiser, as well as their expanded cast of players, have little to no problem exposing themselves - of and to that loneliness and all of the vast promises and coos of love -- and such a comment has nothing to do with the cover of the band's latest album, "Wild Go," which features Invie, LaCount and Kaiser buck-naked from the backside. LaCount and Kaiser are staring up at the ceiling, while Invie has craned her neck off to the side, looking at the camera as if it had no place being there, but there's a look in her eyes - as her right hand rubs the chill bumps from her cold left forearm - that says that there will be no altercation, that we're free to stay and try and make out what those tattooed words half-circling along the top of her pelvic bone spell out. They present themselves, both in the pictorials on their album and in the words and music they write, as people most interested in the chilliest howls that love can blow and in the starkest ways that we let ourselves get handled by our emotions and those of others. Invie sings on the record, "Do you love me, do you love that paint, exposing that brick, crumbling a bit," with the crumbling paint doubling for the person speaking, we tend to think, worse for the wear, giving of herself until it hurts quite a lot. There's so much earnest seeking and spiritual yearning in the songs of Dark Dark Dark, that you leave them feeling as if the wild goose chase that Invie and LaCount sing about is worth it. It almost has to be worth it, for it creates in people the kinds of emotions that - while burning and sometimes utterly painful - can make them feel as if they were touching something holy with their sadnesses. And with that, there's less sadness in the sadness and just more light in the fibers.