The No Name Record

To a large degree, the indie-rock movement has been about music buffs recreating the past that suits them best. For the past couple of years, a lot of them have been stuck in the post-punk '80s—just as a decade ago they were mired in the arena-rock '70s—but lately, some musicians have been hunting up fresh antiques. The Swedish stoners of Elope favor early Neil Young and glam rock, but rather than combining the two into predictably crunchy, big-hook anthems, the band picks up on how both styles salve bruised souls with heroic posturing and reverberation. On "My Expectant Killer," the first track on Elope's debut The No Name Record, the band softens the drums and guitar, letting Tomas Eriksson's fluid bass and Sebastian Aronsson's trembling voice snake around each other sensuously. "Sentimental Heart Alarm" and "Lilith," meanwhile, bite bigger chunks of classic-rock meat, with the latter using a cowbell and heavy guitar chords to power down a simple chorus. Elope covers Young's "Bad Fog Of Loneliness" fairly reverently, but The No Name Record's showpiece is the nearly seven-minute "Pride Approaching," a psychedelic boogie epic that rocks like Golden Earring, then rolls like The Beatles. It sounds uncannily like a lost classic from 1973, right down to the spacey organ solo.