What started as a collective of friends in Philadelphia fooling around with amateur recording techniques will roll its way into Tulsa’s historic Cain’s Ballroom on Monday night, with sunny, late-’60s/early ’70s AM radio sounds in tow.

The band is Dr. Dog, which unabashedly records charming, harmonic rock ’n’ roll more than 40 years after the genre’s heyday, and on dated equipment to boot. 2007’s undeniably catchy “We All Belong,” the psych rockers’ third full-length, divided critics and sparked accusations of nostalgia, which lead guitarist Scott McMicken doesn’t deny.

“Recording on a four-track wasn’t a choice,” he said. “It’s what we had. It also happened to suit us.”

The album garnered a lot of attention ("Rolling Stone" dropped it in at No. 39 on its Top 50 Albums list that year), which drew bigger crowds and focused the band’s oddball, Guided by Voices-inspired recording fetishism on a sound that would bolster its stage presence.

“We’re all self-taught in terms of engineering, but our knowledge is growing,” McMicken said. “One record’s really not enough material to explore things. We want to go further.”

But all those years of homemade demos and self-recorded material resulted in a wealthy catalogue of obscure tracks that, often enough, get requested at shows. McMicken credited the indie labels Park the Van Records and ANTI- for accommodating Dr. Dog’s wishes to distribute music however its members wanted.

These days, however, the act has returned to a more conventional album cycle, which suits the guys just fine.

“Studio’s fun,” McMicken said. “But being on the road and playing shows is more influential aspect of what we’re doing as a band.”

The result isn’t much of a surprise.

He said Dr. Dog’s next album, due out in February, will be louder and more up-tempo than anything the group has recorded, largely due to the addition of drummer Eric Slick.

“I can’t talk enough about how much better he’s made all of us. The album is more guitar-focused and dirtier, ’cause of how fast he got us all to play. It’s very punk,” McMicken said. “In the past, we’ve tended to dial it back for at times an acoustic sound. We leave guitars out of things a lot. Not anymore.”

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