The Society of Rockets used to be known as the Shimmer Kids Underpop Association, and beneath that banner this California ensemble produced an impressively expansionist take on woozy homemade psych-pop. Unfortunately, the Shimmer Kids timed their arrival a couple of years too late to climb aboard the Elephant 6 and Terrastock gravy train, and though records like 2002's The Natural Riot showed great promise, by that point it seemed most listeners were too Olivia Tremor Controlled-out for the group to really enter their audience's collective forebrain.

In 2003, after the Shimmer Kids' accomplished The Book of Mirrors EP sank with barely a ripple, the group again assembled in the recording studio, but this time they found their new material to be such a drastic change from their previous work that the result was a reconfigured line-up with the new Society of Rockets name. Gone are the Shimmer Kids' grandiose paisley epics, stuffed to the rafters with dense layers of oddball instrumentation. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.