It starts with an admonition: "You better wake up, that time is gone." It ends with a promise not to return. If the founding members of power-pop quartet the dB's regrouped for their first album in 30 years with a modicum of confidence, you wouldn't think it from the album's lyrics. These are bittersweet songs of experience: reflective, sorrowful, mourning lost places, faces and times. Far Away and Long Ago, sung by Chris Stamey in his best imitation of Paul McCartney, is particularly affecting, a dusky elegy for a relationship that refuses to be forgotten. It's atypical, too: mostly the songs chug along exuberantly, jangly melodies and bouncy choruses marrying the energy of youth with the finesse of age. It's not radical, and quality varies, but their sharper moments are glorious, especially That Time Is Gone, Peter Holsapple's furiously nasal voice slicing across Stamey's needling guitar, and Write Back, sung by drummer Will Rigby as though throwing boulders at his ex-lover's window.