They’re the modern sound of San Francisco past, with sweet folky rock born of freewheeling blues jams and vintage mentality. The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound‘s second album for Tee Pee Records, When Sweet Sleep Returned, is hippie psych melody taken to echoing extremes. The music is springtime vibrant and organically grown and all the drugs are geared toward mind expansion rather than escape — which, I suppose, is a kind of escape in itself.

Hey man, did I just blow your mind?

If so, that’s nothing compared to the explosive potentiality packed into When Sweet Sleep Returned, which sets up a commune and gives each of its eight tracks a period of not more than three weeks to act as a sort of executive officer whose decisions must be ratified by a two-thirds majority of the others. I’m willing to wager that all five of the band’s members were born at least 12 years after 1970, but just because they weren’t there the first time doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy it now.

The root trio of Jefferson Marshall, Mike Lardas and Charlie Saufley return with a sound expanded from what was gifted on their Tee Pee debut, Ekranoplan, in 2007, and like latter-day Tee Pee fiends Earthless, or their Californian compatriots Mammatus, The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound offer a neo-Roadburn psychedelia that sits well under yellow and orange lights and allows those in need of a good zoning out to rest their weary minds a while. “The Slumbering Ones” in particular is a song so comfortable you’d swear it was made of memory foam.

One could sit all day and namecheck musical landmarks new and old, Californian and otherwise, but at its core, When Sweet Sleep Returned isn’t about showing off knowledge of obscure ’70s rock — or maybe it is and I’m just not knowledgeable enough — it’s about the sound an electric guitar makes strummed in time with an acoustic, or the sound voices make when they harmonize, or even just something so simple as, “What happens when we try this?” Still, it’s hard not to listen to “By the Rippling Green” and not hear Neil Young, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

It’s interesting to see this generation of retro rockers interpret different aspects of ’70s rock. Where some riff away with heavy metal thunder and/or proto-metal occultism, an act like The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound creates an entirely different atmosphere by focusing on the less abrasively testosteroned side of the era. The artistic direction and the integrity of motive are equally clear, and though the hipster quotient at one of their shows would probably be enough to make me want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, holding the band responsible for that just seems like overkill.

The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound on MySpace

Tee Pee Records

Tags: Bands with Ridiculously Long Names, San Francisco, Tee Pee, The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.