Mazzy Star: "Common Burn"/"Lay Myself Down"

Don't know about you, but I'm not one to automatically get a fan boner when I hear a long dormant band is getting back together to tour. I need new material before I can get really excited.  Look, we'd all like to say we saw the Velvet Underground or Led Zeppelin, but face it: seeing those bands in 2011 doesn't in any way make up for missing them during their 60s/70s peak.  It's a false check mark off your "to do" list.

Mazzy Star is doing this reunion thing right.  For all intents and purposes the band is Hope Sandoval and guitarist David Roback, and though neither is really old enough to be burnt out or passed their prime on the live stage necessarily, I think reunion tours sans new material are really too commonplace to get worked up over.  I'd rather the Cars get back together and make a so-so album - easily one of the minor entries in their catalog - than for the Police to tour incessantly but not manage to eek out a single new track out of it.

Of course this ethos can always backfire if the band fails to build on old chemistry and just flat out embarrasses themselves on their new album (a lot of 70s/80s punk bands fall prey to this) but based on the two cuts leaked so far this sounds like a legit comeback effort... neither song is overtly catchy enough to make for a likely hit single but each has subtle charms that invite repeat listening.

1990: "Ghost Highway", Mazzy Star

When Opal splintered in the midst of a tour for their 1987 opus Happy Nightmare Baby, guitarist David Roback replaced vocalist Kendra Smith with Hope Sandoval and briefly continued the Opal brand, penning a handful of new songs for a second Opal full length to be titled Ghost Highway. By 1989 he had renamed the band Mazzy Star and the following year that band debuted with She Hangs Brightly. Building on his Paisley Underground roots by incorporating various Americana elements - blues, folk, country - into the Paisley bouillabaisse of psychedelia, dream pop and 60s rock, Mazzy Star took a few years before finding their feet with the hit 1994 single, "Fade Into You" (itself charting only a year or so after its parent album dropped), but in retrospect She Hangs Brightly is hardly a furtive creative effort. The song "Ghost Highway" sounds driven and self assured while setting the template for the band's metamorphosis from the Paisley overtones of Opal into the rootsier strains of Mazzy Star.



BONUS: Opal playing "Ghost Highway" live in 1988.