When Sweet Sleep Returned [CD]

This San Francisco band's sound is a soundtrack for strange days and futures bright and bleak. There's also a crooked thread running backward through each of their records: the celestial trajectories of the Notorious Byrd Brothers and circa '70s Floyd; the dusty canyon stomps of Crazy Horse, the slashing action pop of the savage young Who, Italian bastardizations of Lalo Schifrin cop movie scores, and the scuzz-bomb shrapnel of garage mongers like Mudhoney and Monoshock. Their third release also finds the band speaking their own twisted tongue, marrying hazy Saturday moods, interstellar sonics, and wrecking ball swing to song and harmony in poems for California, lovers, ghosts, the stars, and a world gone mad.