Somewhere Between Here and Nowhere

Jersey City’s Black Hollies wander through the history of rock ‘n’ roll with a love for its darkest, weirdest corners. “Unless It’s My Imagination” combines a Velvet Underground/“Sister Ray” rhythm and organ with Paisley Underground psychedelic shivers. The goofily titled “Benevolent Bacon” travels down the path of Mazzy Star but with a more demanding attitude that befits the band's Jersey roots. Chief songwriter Justin Angelo Morey shifted his songwriting approach for The Black Hollies' fourth album, which took three years to record under multiple conditions. The Spacemen 3–type slow drones enrich the turtle-like crawl of “Daydreams.” Keyboardist Joe Gonnelli provides an unlimited stream of vintage keyboard sounds to further place the music into a mid- to late-‘60s time warp, while the deliberately dirty production on the title track turns a beat-group “hey hey hey” romp into a song that sounds as if it'd been rescued from studio tapes lost in the vaults for decades. Not since the underrated U.K. ‘80s garage band The Prisoners has such a thick, powerful sound been reached in service to garage rock and its psychedelic counterparts. Excellent!