Sometimes you just feel like telling the '60s to go away. As if all those gleefully plagiarizing Brit-pop bands weren't enough, now we have a whole wave of North Americans (the Posies, Fountains of Wayne, Jason Falkner, et al.) taking 30-year-old power pop as their principal point of departure.

Three albums into their career, the Halifax, Nova Scotia, quartet Sloan are moving steadily closer to the Beatlesque sensibility at the core of their sound. If 1992's Smeared was paisley-underground pop cranked up with big drums and loud guitars, 1994 saw the band toning things down on the more intimate, less steamrolling Twice Removed. Now it has gone whole hog and made a record that sounds like swinging-'60s Britain transposed to a '90s Canadian garage.

The low-fi, near-bootleg quality of One Chord to Another is a bold move: Dig the mashed-down guitars, the out-of-tune pianos, the drum sound that might have been sampled from the Kingsmen's "Louie, Louie." What elevates the record above mere pastiche is a batch of really special, quirky, melodic songs, some of which ("Autobiography," "Anyone Who's Anyone," "Everything You've Done Wrong") make the debt to Rubber Soul-era Beatles plainer than others. The gorgeous "Junior Panthers" leans closer to Brian Wilson than to the Fabs, while "Can't Face Up" could be Elvis Costello's "The Loved Ones" rewritten by the dBs. "The Lines You Amend" kicks off as "The Ballad of John and Yoko" but ends up as a likable hybrid of T. Rex and Crowded House.

If anything grates on One Chord, it is a slight tendency for knowingness. Songs like "The A Side Wins" and "G Turns to D" are nerdishly pleased with themselves, and the reference to Ringo Starr on "The Lines You Amend" is too arch by half. But these are minor misgivings about a very fine record. If '60s retro pop is finally becoming a genre unto itself, then Sloan are right up there in its vanguard. (RS 755)

BARNEY HOSKYNS