Silver Sunshine SILVER SUNSHINE (Empyrean Records)

This San Diego foursome’s debut is an audacious introduction to a band who sound as if they’d time-warped from an alternate universe where it’s always 1967 (but with better production values) and to a new imprint under the expanding umbrella of Rhode Island’s Wishing Tree Records. Like fellow modern-day lava lamplighters the Green Pajamas and the Soundtrack of Our Lives, Silver Sunshine filter dazzling psych-pop hooks through swirling, vertiginous atmospheres and lysergic ruminations: romantic infatuation as sensory-overload acid trip ("I See the Silver Sunshine"); haunted obsessions with ghostly babes ("Nightmares"); nocturnal strolls through the fields of an overactive imagination ("Greenfield Park"). The best among the many standout tracks here is the bracing, raga-flavored opener, "Velvet Skies," which cross-pollinates the Chemical Brothers’ "Setting Sun" (and, by extension, the Beatles’ "Tomorrow Never Knows," replete with backwards guitars) with Jeff Beck’s "Beck’s Bolero" and wraps the whole spiked popsicle in a Day-Glo coat of Slowdive/Stone Roses retrodelica. Trippy old-school sound effects like phased guitars and vocal harmonies sung from echo chambers plastered with black-light posters of Arthur Lee and Syd Barrett and then soaked in blessed reverb are a big part of the freakout fun. The Floydian cuckoo clocks, chimes, and chirping birds that dot the landscape make you wonder whether Silver Sunshine are winking at a grand, album-length inside joke, but XTC alter egos the Dukes of Stratosphear sounded pretty terrific having a laugh too.