The Time Has Come

There are one-hit wonders and then there are no-hit wonders. The Alarm Clocks fall into the latter category, one of countless adrenalized suburban garage bands that released a single in the '60s — theirs was "No Reason to Complain" backed with "Yeah," issued on the Awake label in the immortal year of 1966 — only to disappear as quickly as they'd risen. Discovered by collectors years after their demise, the Alarm Clocks found their lone contribution to rock reissued on post-Nuggets compilations and then all of their dusty unreleased tracks gathered by Norton Records on the Yeah! set in 2000. The Time Has Come is their reunion album, which finds the Ohioans both recapturing the past and expanding on it. The Alarm Clocks, presumably in their late fifties when they went back into the studio (except for one new addition, lead guitarist Tom Fallon), can still kick it pretty hard, and save for the more contemporary production, this could pass for a classic 1966 teenage-rock original — it's got loads of blaringly distorted, reverbified fuzz and snarly vocals and even covers of "Like a Rolling Stone" and Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man" (though no "Louie, Louie" or "Wipe Out"). Lead singer/bassist Mike Pierce wrote all of the original material and, thankfully, it's all true to the sound that four decades earlier spawned a million bands just like the Alarm Clocks.