On Alive As You Are, the third album from Darker My Love, the Los Angeles quintet has fully (some would say finally) indulged in the psychedelic pop influences that have permeated California’s music and culture since the 60s, doing away with the fuzzy distortion of their former sound in favor of something far sunnier and melodic. These exuberant tendencies have always been present in the band’s earlier output, but never quite to this extent, and it now seems as if the band are mired in a full-blown identity crisis, bouncing from one genre to the next, just hoping to find one style that finally fits them right. Unfortunately, this blissful, laid-back approach mostly echoes the Grateful Dead filtered through Blitzen Trapper, coming out rather bland and unoriginal, while losing all the tension and edge of their earlier songs in exchange for trippy ebullience.

I’m sure ‘Backseat’ is intended to be a road trip song, akin to ‘Truckin’ or ‘Ballad Of Easy Rider,’ announcing the record’s cross-country, exploratory vibe. To me it just sounds like recycled noodling, and instead of taking us somewhere new, the song just leaves us broken down on the side of the highway looking for a way home. While ‘Split Minute’ sounds like the Clientele if they would’ve grown up near Venice Beach, swapping the dark moodiness of the London outfit for the breezy, innocuous swing of southern Cali. ’18th Street Shuffle’ puts the spotlight squarely on former Brian Jonestown Massacre drummer Dan Allaire, who recently joined the band, and he drives the dynamic song forward with his insistent beat. It’s the most successful song on the record for me, because it seems to be a perfect union of where the band has come from and what direction they are going, blending the fire and intensity of their former sound with their hallucinatory new direction.

Every time I hear the ‘Seasame Street Theme’-sounding guitar riff kick in halfway into ‘New America,’ I laugh at the band’s audacity, while also acknowledging that the subtle salute to the legendary children’s program fits in well with the easy Americana style of the song. But other than that brief flourish the track is rather languorous, wearing its Grateful Dead influence a bit too proudly for my tastes. Their jammy, psychedelic impact permeates most of the work on Alive As You Are, and while Darker My Love never fall victim to the self-indulgent, 10-minute sonic excursions of the celebrated Bay Area band, some of their songs, like ‘Rain Party’ and ‘June Bloom,’ drag along so slowly that it truly seems as if they are that long. And when the band does decide to turn the volume up a bit, on ‘Maple Day Getaway,’ ‘Dear Author’ and ‘A Lovely Game,’ the combination of hokey, trite lyrics and recycled melodies straight out of Haight-Ashbury make the songs utterly forgettable.

Frontman Tim Presley apparently revamped his band’s sound following the death of his father, going for something more honest and true to him, since “Life is too short to fuck around with what you do for a living.” And while I give Presley credit for taking a big chance with this album in the name of artistic sincerity, it comes across as far too schizophrenic a record to think that the band has finally settled into their sound. And, with all of the borrowed styles and obvious influences layered throughout these songs, Darker My Love’s sound can hardly be considered anything other than a pale imitation of a bygone era anyway. This band needs to recognize that the Summer Of Love is obsolete, and trying to resuscitate a dead scene is an anachronistic pursuit that will only lead to them being discarded like so much unwanted tie-dyes.