This album starts with a male chorus, echoed finger-snapping, and an occasional flamenco guitar strum—fuck, it could be a spaghetti western ballad (or, more likely, a Spindrift song) if it didn’t also have some electronic beats behind it …

Channeling recent heroes Thee Makeout Party but reaching back as far as those pre-British Invasion American party poppers the Rivieras, Heroes + Heroines is here to stay.

It’s the difference between hippies, taking massive bong hits, and revolutionary freaks snorting the same prepared cannabinoid snuff the Zulu used to knock the shit out of the British.

Perhaps YOU, fair reader, need encouragement to look past the U.K. gossip rags and Houghton’s Gaga-esque costumery, and really engage with this album’s songs. Do it!

Their singer is a girl, and she doesn’t sound like she cares about anything she’s singing about.

“I Fell in Love With the Grateful Dead” is a rework of “Raised by Hippies” off 2006’s California Country, but “Highland Park Serenade” is one of their most affecting tunes ever—a tender and dearly felt tribute to one more gently crumbling jewel box neighborhood.

Geronimo’s vocals are a marriage of Karen O and Toni Basil. The twang of Andrew Scarborough’s guitar is evenly matched with the tight drumming of Michael Rudes. The A-side is tenacious, but just when you think you have this band pegged as another lo-fi beach band, they turn you on your ear with the flip side of the disc, “Shot on the Spot.” As if they were blown straight off the wind-swept ponderosa of a Sergio Leone flick, Raw Geronimo deliver their own spaghetti western strut. Laena’s sultry lyrics hypnotize, a fine effect, while her bandmates synthesize the grandeur of a Man With No Name epic to a tight clip just shy of three minutes.

On this album, he’s pared down the Howling Hex lineup to just guitar, bass and his voice (though I swear there’s about two seconds of brushed snare and maybe a secret keyboard here and there). And while he keeps a bit of the border vibe, especially on the closer “A Game of Dice,” this thing sounds a lot like what a stoned cowboy might have recorded in that burned-out house near Albuquerque where Tuco got killed in Breaking Bad.

No iMac here—this lo-fi assemblage of beats around looped vocal clips feels put together with twine, and reminds me of one of the best eras of hip-hop, when groups like EPMD really got out the scratchy vinyl and put together smart, evocative new songs that respected their source material while standing on its shoulders to achieve something utterly new. Except, you know, EPMD had rappers, and here there are none, except maybe the loops of Ned Flanders saying “Son of a gun-diddley-un!”