This is the third album from Madison, WI, sonic psych-miners Shazy Hade. It is an intriguing affair even before you get to the end of the title. There is the obvious spoonerism of the band’s name, which I like, and then the tautology of the album itself, which I’m not so sure about (in this context, returns and again mean the same thing; hopefully, that’s the point), so there is already a lot going on before you drop the virtual needle on the digital disc.
But when you do, a whole new world opens up. And this world is not so much the Sixties as a version of that decade (with plenty of 70s thrown in, too) that didn’t really exist. It’s the band’s own vision of the Sixties, a dream state, an alternative timeline version of what those times might have sounded like.
Things kick off in early seventies, Bowie-in-art-rock-mode fashion, all strutting bravado mixed with drug-laced energies, with Time Runs, End Days, crackles with a more New Wave vibe, Dead Things is the sound of punk being invented in 1966 rather than ten years later and Piss On My Parade is a song that ? & The Mysterians would have killed to have written.
They say that if you remember the sixties, you weren’t really there. That may be true, but at least we now have Shazy Hade’s alternative version of things for those too young or too out of it at the time as a record of what might have been.
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