"Old Home Movies" by The Botticellis (Antenna Farm Records) -Out Now

If born in the ’70s or early ’80s, you did it, too. You riffled through your parents’ old albums, trying to make sense of strange names and creased images—Petula Clark in a pink raincoat, the Beatles crossing a street, a woman covered with whipped cream.  You held a heavy record in your small hands. With help from your father you put it on the turntable, lowered the needle and triggered a storm of scratchy static, a prelude to the first notes of a not-so-far off past.

In 2008, with CDs becoming quaint, the days of album covers and vinyl seem positively antediluvian. But, oh, those memories are there, warm, gauzed, dreamy.

If you’re feeling pangs of nostalgia, you might dig The Botticellis’ “Old Home Movies.”

The San Francisco quintet’s debut album leans heavily on ’60s surf rock, complete with tamborines, airy background vocals and lots of Phil Spector-style reverb, but seen through a 21st century lens. Throughout there are echoes of the Shins, the Ocean Blue and, in one track “Who are you now,” ambient strains fitting of the Cocteau Twins.

But, see, it fits. The album is that dynamic. In the title track, a feverish Vox organ pumps to a chorus of doo-doo-doos, opening the window on that bygone era of hip-shaking pop. And in the upbeat “Up Against the Glass,” you may even want to do the surfer stomp.

Keep listening, because “The Reviewer” has some John Mellencamp in the guitar riffs and Beatles in the melody. And “Flashlight” is an acoustic waltz. Yes, a waltz. The song was composed during lyricist Blythe Foster’s grad school days at Columbia. Rats inside the walls of her building kept her up at night, so the song was a way of getting back at them. I don’t like rats, but I like the song. So, thanks, rats.

The lyrics are another story. Alexi Glickman’s vocals are sometimes lost amid the lush instrumentals, making his words hard to figure out, a bit like listening to someone speaking a foreign language you have just begun to study. You pick out a word here or there, but you’re not getting it.

Seeing the words don’t help so much as you’d think. This is from “Flashlight:” “I stole your flashlight/to dissuade you/still go out I know/while I fall asleep with your clothes.” There’s enough there to do some imagining, but we’re still left largely in the dark. Without a flashlight, that is.

Not that ambiguous lyrics are a disservice. On the contrary, they help make the album so compelling. In “Old Home Movies,” which is ostensibly about returning home after leaving for some time, “it’s not Alaska without the snow/I told you to wait in the cold/you wait too long.”

Other tracks have a clear storyline. In “The Reviewer,” a critic speaks to a young band, telling them, “I’m only talking down to the people looking up,” and then ominously advising, “Save us the work of tearing you apart and give up before you even start.”

Pretty haunting, considering the sweet pop backdrop, but perhaps that fuzzy incongruity is part of the appeal of memories. And, ultimately, of The Botticellis.