Elephant Stone makes the old sound new again

Elephant Stone is the kind of band where you could probably guess what it sounds like based on the name alone. After all, the Montreal quintet is named after a Stone Roses song, a dreamy jangle pop single from 1988. Fittingly, the group’s influences are almost entirely British, fusing ’90s Britpop with ’60s psychedelia and, yes, liberal doses of the Stone Roses.

Luckily, hazy pop rock is fashionable right now, so Elephant Stone’s debut album, The Seven Seas, doesn’t come off as outdated—note the similarity between “I Am Blind” and “Contender” by the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, a song that came out earlier this year. And the songwriting is sharp, so the group is likely to seem outdated any time soon. “Bombs Bomb Away” is upbeat and hooky despite its morbid subject matter, while the swooning anti-love song “Blood from a Stone” is laden with cinematic strings and gorgeous tremolo guitar.

The group’s forays into psychedelia are, unfortunately, less successful. On several of the songs, frontman Rishi Dhir doubles on sitar, and these tracks seem more like caricatures of ’60s world music than genuine embodiments of it. “The Straight Line” is an aimless seven-minute sitar jam and, placed right in the middle of the album, it sucks some of the energy out of the collection. The sitar works better on “The Seven Seas,” when it is used as an accompanying instrument in a focused pop song.

Still, despite the occasional misstep, The Seven Seas has plenty of well-written pop songs, and is an excellent contribution to the retro jangle rock scene. It’s out now via Elephants on Parade.