“I do believe that there’s no more tricks up my sleeve,” goes the chorus of “Stranger,” the first song on Dr. Dog’s new album Shame, Shame — only, methinks they’re selling themselves a bit short. They may not unveil any new tricks on this, their sixth album, but when their standard bag of tricks is so impressive, who’s going to complain? The Philly band has one trick, in particular, that makes their records consistently enjoyable, and this one more than any of ‘em: it’s the trick of taking the past and reshaping it in their own image.

The first sound you hear on the entire album is the crisp jangle of a tambourine, a little detail that somehow seems significant, if only because Dr. Dog is a band that takes little details very seriously. It’s a little sonic flourish that adjusts the listener’s senses to register an album on which the little textures and tweaks in the production are half the fun — an album, in other words, that takes great pride and pleasure in sounding good. The men of Dr. Dog have long been classified as ’60s fetishists, and that’s as true here as ever, but the New Pornographers they ain’t. Where some ’60s worshipping pop groups focus on the power chords, Dr. Dog finds inspiration in the earliest innovations of studio craft, and Shame, Shame is awash in Abbey Road postproduction trickery and carefully-placed Pet Sounds.

It’s a direction they began on Fate, an album that really found them hitting their stride as a band, and they continue to perfect their craft on this record, which manages the neat trick of sounding just as infatuated of studiocraft, just as polished and attentive to detail, but also rawer, looser, and more direct. Part of that has to do with a deepening of their influences; never before have they allowed their rootsier instincts to crop up quite so much, and at times Shame, Shame is as indebted to folk- and even country-rock as much as it is to Beatles-esque pop. Check out how “Shadow People” starts off as a linear folk number before a few weird production flourishes usher in the inspired pop harmonies, which could really be traced back to either The Beatles or The Band.

The album is less a departure, more an extension of what they’ve done before, which will likely to little to silence the criticisms that Dr. Dog is a band stubbornly set in its ways. Personally, I don’t think they’re stubborn so much as defiant; there’s nothing flashy about what they do, and in many ways their devotion to craft makes them rock dinosaurs. But it’s grossly uncharitable to say that Shame, Shame is slight, or to condemn it for lacking surprise; Dr. Dog isn’t prone to making big statements, but rather creating catalogs of small, simple pleasures, and on this album they deliver them in spades.