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It may be a weird hot summer of 2020 out there, with London bustling in all the wrong areas as if nothing ever happened, but in my cool 21-degree studio it's still 1969, with The Youngbloods laying down their special cocktail of folk meets psychedelia meets country-rock, with the very first track, "Darkness, Darkness" being the highlight on their third album. The rest is just lukewarm, mellow, and whimsical collection of songs, perfect for the Bay Area pastoral summer. Some of the music feels like it could be played by a trio in the back of a restaurant, combining blues and an electric piano waltz, like the unnecessarily-long "On Sir Francis Drake" that seems to just go on in an unpredictable direction for over seven minutes. The instrumental tracks are at least tolerable, like "Trillium" that sounds like a soundtrack to an afterschool special. Not sure that I would celebrate "Elephant Mountain" as one of the key albums at the end of the 60s, and I suspect that it will be the first to get bumped once this weird year ends, and "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" would have to swap it out for something like... I don't know. Run the Jewels? Haim? Taylor Swift? I haven't paid attention to pop music in 2020. Have you?