The fallout of the hippie revolution left a cargo hull full of emotional baggage to unpack from the late 1960s to early ’80s, much of it tinged in melancholy, regret and unrequited anticipation. The 20 songs compiled on Sad About The Times captures that era’s peculiar emotional fragility with various spins on folk and country rock, what was once known as “soft rock,” with bits of aspirant prog-rock sophistication and psychedelic-rock jetsam tossed in for good measure.
Though performed in variants of popular styles, what’s collected here was never necessarily popular; Sad acts as an especially cohesive exercise in crate-digging from forgotten major and indie label releases and rarer privately pressed albums. Late Milwaukeean Jim Spencer, whose protean catalog is soon due a retrospective album of its own, is represented with a smoothly sung sort of jazz/folk samba possessed of dire ruminations. That number and several others correspond to the debt owed by much current indie rock to certain strains of the ’70s musical mainstream, as well as the dour perspective infused into the current mainstream through such sources as SoundCloud hip-hop and emo punk. It’s funny how times change yet remain strangely the same.
