The Chocolate Watchband, "Secret Rendezvous" (Dirty Water)

Many music fans may have lost track of the Chocolate Watchband over the ensuing decades, thinking of them safely ensconced in memories of their late-'60s heyday and canonized by Nuggets box sets and myriad garage/psych compilations. But no. The California group's been reunited since 1999, and they're about to release their first album of new material since that year's Get Away; Dirty Water Records will be issuing This Is My Voice on February 22, 2019. It's a surprisingly vital combination of sociopolitical-oriented original songs and complementary covers of trenchant tunes by the Mothers of Invention, Bob Dylan, the Music Machine, and the Seeds.

The LP's lead single, "Secret Rendezvous," is not so much a return to form as it is a manifestation of a new style for the Chocolate Watchband. You'll search in vain for anything else in their small yet classics-packed catalog that sounds like "Secret Rendezvous." Instead of plumbing the raunchy, Jaggerific garage-rock of "Sweet Young Thing," "Don't Need Your Lovin'," and "Let's Talk About Girls" or the ultra-trippy psych-rock of "In the Past" or "No Way Out," "Secret Rendezvous" evokes the Stooges circa Raw Power—if they were a power-pop group. (Nowadays singer David Aguilar sounds more like the Saints' Chris Bailey than he does Mick.)

I did not see this coming. But now that this brawny, soaring stomper with mucho cowbell is permanently embedded in my memory banks, I'm happy that the Chocolate Watchband have returned to the fray with such bravado.

The Chocolate Watchband play the Tractor Tavern on Sunday, December 2 with the Young Fresh Fellows and Knights of Trash.