Dr Dog.

TUESDAY MORNING, way too early for me to be up, and I'd already been lost for nearly an hour on the way to an appointment or class, or job or meeting I didn't want to go to in the first place. Two months of snow and sand and salt, and my little burnt melon shit box of a car was wheezing and sputtering in an endless loop of one-way streets and rotaries that spit me back out wherever I didn't need to be. Repetition and frustration were conspiring together to make the places I had never been become more familiar than I wanted them to be.

And this is where Dr Dog comes in. I heard the Philadelphia band's new record Easy Beat (National Parking) for the first time that morning, and something about the contradiction of the sunny harmonies and the peculiar melancholy of the lyrics transported me into an alternate universe where West Virginia was California and John Lennon and Brian Wilson chilled out chopping firewood on the beach grooving on one another's beards. The snow was gone.

On the way to recognizing something is awesome, there are a lot of safeguards that kick in. So for an instant I thought, "OK, this sounds like the Shins sort of retro pop ... no, no, it's more like an Olivia Tremor Control style, no, cut that, it's ripping off the Beatles out-fight, not bands that rip-off the Beatles." But the truth is, Dr Dog are just on some other level shit, and although their influences might provide you with an entry point on first listen, the songs unfold like an old-timey, backwoods onion. Rotten in a good way.

I asked guitarist Andrew Jones and keyboard player Zach Miller about how the sense of rural dread ("I went out to the shed and put shellac in my head, but nobody noticed but me") creeps into the music of a rock band from Philly. "We all come from rural or suburban areas," Miller told me. "That urban spirit isn't instilled in us. In West Philadelphia, it's not like a downtown type area. Outside our practice space there are Victorian homes, lots of trees, no hustle and bustle."

"We have a lot of blue-grass and folk in our backgrounds," Jones added. "Where we grew up is close to the country of Maryland and West Virginia, so we're not far enough removed where old time music is viewed as a novelty."

It's the sense of opening a time capsule from the turn of the last] century and finding out that some moonshine-slinging dudes wrote Abbey Road seventy years early that makes Dr Dog exciting. You feel the guitars and the voices crackling and groaning into distortion, and the hiss of the tape is basically another instrument. Miller assured me that was all a matter of a new band using whatever they had at their disposal to make a record, but I think it couldn't have worked out better. "If there was a missed drum hit, or there was noise on the tape, or the recording clicked in too early, we'd just go with it," Miller said. "But we used the same type of recording equipment that the Beatles used, and no one calls them a lo-fi band."

When I suggested that I didn't think it would be possible to make a Dr Dog record with a huge budget in a fancy studio, Miller admitted that Scott (McMicken) and Toby (Leaman, the band is rounded out by Juston Stens) were really into Steely Dan, so who knows, maybe they could move off into slicker, lighter FM directions. "We just want how we sound to be a choice," Jones said. "We won't oppose any new opportunities on moral grounds."

Perhaps the defining opportunity for the band came when an early Dr Dog demo found its way into the hands of Jim dames from My Morning Jacket. "After Scott gave dim our CD, he wrote Scott a letter, We all read it together. It was so exciting, because, outside of the prospect of touring with them, he is a musician who we all genuinely love. We were calling everyone we know telling them about it." Two tours with My Morning Jacket later, Dr Dog has tasted a little more of the good side of the road than they likely would have without the help. "We were just getting started," Miller told me, "and had only been in this lineup of the band for five months. We went from small clubs to playing 1,000-seaters. It was quite a leap. We got a little spoiled. We got food, we got paid a at every show, which is crazy for a band with no credentials."

In the context of Dr Dog's music, that all seems the way it should be. It is a seamless blending of the music's static roots with the song's galloping rhythms that imply constant movement, a sense that there are places where we have been, and there are places we need to get to right away. Check www.drdogmusic.com.