Singer-guitarist Jason Simon’s languid mumble almost becomes a down-home drawl on Old Growth, Dead Meadow’s wide-ranging fifth album. The heavy-rock quartet, recently relocated from D.C. to L.A., hasn’t quite invented stoner Americana, but this is the group’s most rustic album yet. If the music is still predominantly black and blue—Sabbath and Cheer, that is—it also includes some unexpected new colors.

The Meadow’s last record, Feathers, leavened its thump with a few songs that featured acoustic guitar and madrigal-like melodies. This one begins with the prototypically lumbering, woozy and wah-wah-heavy “Ain’t Got Nothing (To Go Wrong),” but eventually makes its way to a countrified closer, “Either Way,” that opens on “some dark Southern highway.” In between, the band dabbles with sitars and politics, and finds affinities with classic British rock: “The Great Deceiver” grinds on a distant cousin of the Beatles’ “Come Together” riff, and on songs like the country-blues “I’m Gone,” Simon’s slurred delivery resembles that of the Only Ones’ Peter Perrett.

The band acknowledges its hometown with the anti-Bush “Hard People Hard Times,” but what’s more characteristically D.C. is that the Meadow plays metal-rooted music that isn’t devil-worshipping or woman-hating. Even when Old Growth isn’t being particularly trippy, its style of headbanging is radiantly mind-expanding.

—Mark Jenkins

Dead Meadow plays Bowery Ballroom Wed 16.