Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound – When Sweet Sleep Returned (Tee Pee)

It’s easy to peg San Francisco’s ASSEMBLE HEAD IN SUNBURST SOUND as a revival act, particularly of the kind of free-flowing, psychedelicized rock that proliferated in the late 60s and 70s before calcifying into arena rock. But on the band’s third album When Sweet Sleep Returned, the word-scramble monikered band sounds less like a deliberate throwback than a continuation – clearly, for these guys, the sounds of an earlier era never went out of fashion. Thus the cloudy production (with vox mixed in the middle as another instrument), fuzzy guitars and meandering song structures sound less like nostalgia than faith-keeping. Besides, any rock & roll band worth its stripe knows that the songs matter as much as or more than the sound, and this one’s got tunes that stick: the rocking “Drunken Leaves,” the dreamy “The Slumbering Ones,” the psychedelic “Clive and the Lyre” (which comes damn close to shoegazer nirvana). More than just a retro revival act, on When Sweet Sleep Returned Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound is more accurately a keeper of the flame.

http://myspace.com/theassembleheadinsunburstsound
http://teepeerecords.com