Jo Passed - Their Prime (CD)

The nicest thing anyone has ever said to Jo Hirabayashi, frontman of Jo Passed, is that his band's debut album sounds like ""fucked-up Beatles."" Titled Their Prime, the LP does sound like fucked-up Beatles. It sounds like, somewhere across an '80s universe, Lennon and McCartney discovered Can and Neu!, and maybe a little Sonic Youth and XTC along the way. Opening with ""Left,"" it demonstrates that timeless knack for dreamy melodies - chord progressions that sound like they were created in a land far far away. Lyrically, however, it's imbued with a philosophical longing for answers to questions that have resurfaced for the first time since the explosion of counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s.