Bastards are back

For a band lumped in with the indie retro-rock movement, which is led by acts including the Black Keys and the White Stripes, Heartless Bastards rarely embraces actual rock ’n’ roll raucousness.

Even the ostensibly anthemic “Got to Have Rock and Roll,” the third track on the band’s latest LP, “Arrow,” is incredibly low-key, the band apparently more interested in replicating “Going to California” than “Black Dog.”

Nothing is inherently wrong with that, and the Ohio foursome pulls it off well. Frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom’s boozy drawl is the perfect complement to the glacially-paced, bluesy rock she lays it over.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best songs are the ones in which the Heartless Bastards go long. Six-minute-plus tracks “Marathon,” “The Arrow Killed the Beast” and especially the Sabbath-nodding album closer “Down in the Canyon” show how powerful the band’s sound can be when it strives for the epic.

The tension these longer songs allow the band to build doesn’t come through in the short numbers, which could almost uniformly stand to be more up-tempo. Still, when Wennerstrom intones “the hour is getting late” during “Canyon,” the whole ride feels worth it.