CD Review

With the music industry chasing its own tail and suing everyone who gives it a chance, while half the independent artists out there set up their own shill game in some honest but futile attempt to make MySpace what MTV once was, one has to take a step back and ask, where have all the acid heads gone? We found this oddly monikered trio in the first place we looked: San Francisco. And it sounds as though they crawled into a time machine after the rave scene went pop in the early-mid nineties and now they're back from the halcyon days to trot out the vintage sound minus the revolution and innovation. The Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, and the emerging slew of better (Dead Meadow) and worse (most of the rest) rock ("neo-psychedelia" if you want a buzzword) bands that seem to have given up on popular music made after 1990 as inspiration (and I only go that far because I do hear the Mudhoney piping at the gates of dawn) are a fine weaving of the sounds that run through your head when you hear the words "heavy acid rock." And that's not pigeonholing, or copping out, or not seeing the forest for the faces melting in the trees—it's simply a high compliment. And maybe there is a tripped-out sort of revolution involved in continuing the sound dream as though the nightmares of the new millennium don't need a new soundtrack. Or maybe there's just comfort in the old warm fuzz. Either way, it's a stone groove.