Opening your first album in nearly 20 years with a song called "That Time Is Gone" is either bracingly honest or immensely foolhardy-- or possibly both. On , the dB's invoke their long-ago heyday and acknowledge that they'll never be young again. "Better wake up, wake up, wake up, that time is gone!" Peter Holsapple exhorts the listener over a modified garage groove. Despite that disclaimer, there's a familiar depth to the guitars, which don't jangle so much as they slice and pop and rumble. It's both a fitting reminder that they were always more at home in the studio than on stage, where they could tweak and refine their sound endlessly, and a nod to that long-gone time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the dB's were the best North Carolina band in New York, sprouting from the ashes of Sneakers and moonlighting in Alex Chilton's band and R.E.M. The dB's' first records-- 1981's Stands for DeciBels and 1982's Repercussion-- mixed paisley-strewn mod rock with prickly postpunk, sunny West Coast harmonies, Big Star pop romanticism, and the jittery jangle that was then becoming a signature of Southern college bands.