The press release for The Len Price 3's new record, Pictures, namedrops almost as often as the Game did on The Documentary. Whether featuring a Steven Van Zandt quote about them sounding like early-period Who or the release itself proclaiming comparisons to The Kinks, the Creation and, yes, the Who, the fact that such assessments are (overly) plentiful - even including a quote from Rolling Stone's David Fricke calling the band rock saviors - suggests that perhaps the praise is warranted. After all, rock critics and PR reps probably aren't as full of shit as the public might assume. I'd like to think so, anyway.

Thankfully, it's clear from the outset of Pictures that the above evaluations aren't that far off, either in terms of sounding like the aforementioned bands or in terms of quality songwriting. The trio - comprised of singer/guitarist Glenn Page, bassist Steve Huggins and drummer/backup singer Neil Fromow - here has it all. The trio has catchy vocal hooks found in 'Keep Your Eyes On Me,' 'I Don't Believe You' and 'The Great Omani' that are straight out of 60s garage pop rock, 'Omani' being the best example of this with its hypnotically harmonized 'Bah bah-bah-bah-bah's' of Page and Fromow. The trio has the whole recording-on-analog-tape-thing for that 'vintage, earthy sound that only tape can provide,' as the release states. And it has lyrics that are sing-songy yet honest (like 'I don't know how you face yourself every day/ I don't believe a single word that you say').

As for those name drops, the, ahem, references to the Who are quite accurate. ‘After You're Gone,' ‘Under the Thumb' and the title track all have that angular guitar attack that Pete perfected way back when. That said, the band isn't just infatuated with the ‘60s mod scene. ‘The Girl Who Became A Machine,' for example, has a keyboard line straight out of a Steppenwolf b-side, while ‘Jack in the Greens' owes its sound more to the Shins' sunny demeanor than the Kinks (while keeping the Shins' somewhat paradoxically sad lyrics in tact).

You could easily argue that the Len Price 3 is just a shameless rip-off of music from four decades ago; certainly, there's at least some superficial truth to that. That said, to simply label The Len Price 3 as thieves is to miss the point: the band isn't stealing from Mr. Townshend or Mr. Davies, but instead paying homage to those that wrote what LP3 consider to be some of the best songs of all time. The trio is filtering its own influences into its own tightly constructed songwriting as a way of saying 'Thanks for the tunes' to its heroes, and 'Hey, you should look up these groups' to its fans. If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, the Len Price 3 is kissing all kinds of ass. In a good way.