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Constraining though the 3-minute pop song may be, it has its usefulness — especially when you collect about 12 of them together.

Not that there’s anything wrong with pop songs longer than 3 minutes. Mathematically speaking, 12 x 3 = 36 minutes worth of music, whereas 12 x 5 = 60 minutes worth of music.

The latter offers much bang for the buck — if the songs are worth all five minutes.

And hence the problem with Love Psychedelico’s third album, Love Psychedelico III. The album drags under the weight of its length.

Three of the 13 tracks on the album clock in at less than 5 minutes, but another three clock in a few seconds more than 6 minutes, which cancels each other out.

Length wouldn’t be much of a problem if the album contained really compelling songs, which it doesn’t.

The writing on Love Psychedelico III is just a few degrees shy of Sheryl Crow, despite the fact the band’s unique blend of ’60s rock and ’90s technology remains in tact.

In fact, the chorus of “I am waiting for you” and most of “fleeing star” sound like Crow.

The band’s reliance on drum machines has also locked it into a rhythmically rigid feel. As a result, Love Psychedelico’s songs start blending into each other.

How many more times are we going to listen to Kumi deliver one monotone melody after another?

The longer lengths plus the homogenous writing makes Love Psychedlico III tiring 3/4 of the way through.

Other writers wrote the band off after the second album, but I’m not sure Love Psychedelico’s creative well has totally run dry.

There’s a more overtly southern influence the band hasn’t fully explored, and it may well inject some unpredictability to the duo’s sound.

But Love Psychedelico III finds the pair stuck. And belaboring the point, too.

If Love Psychedelico topped the charts in the States with the same brand of ’60s nostalgia that conquered the Japanese pop charts, it would still be a magnificant feat.

In a musical landscape full of packaged pop, nu metal and (worst of all) Creed, Delico’s debut album The Greatest Hits is an anamoly at worst, a miracle at best.

(Kind of like how the Strokes and Mean Machine managed to sound total new by sonically photocopying Television and the Velvet Underground — respectively.)

In reality, The Greatest Hits was little more than an after thought. Anyone who got hip to Love Psychedelico six months before the duo released the album heard most of the songs already — six of the 11 tracks are available on the singles.

As a result, Delico’s second album, Love Psychedelic Orchestra, sounds positively fresh. Only two singles preceded the release of the album, and most of the material is entirely new.

Repeated listens, however, reveals Love Psychedelic Orchestra is more of an album — a collection of songs meant to feel like a single unit.

When “green” segues seamlessly into “dry town”, Love Psychedelico demonstrate how this time around, they were thinking more ambitiously.

Although KUMI and Sato Naoki still maintain their slavishly devotion to period sounds — those same clangly klaviers, those same wheezy organs, those same jangly guitars — the songs feel darker, and they fit together more nicely.

The “House of the Rising Sun” atmospherics of “dry town” leads nicely into the mellow “I will be with you”.

The infectuous klavier hook that introduces “Standing Bird” makes a good companion to a similarly catchy intro on “Freeworld”.

“life goes on”, with its country-rock groove, makes for a suitable lead-in to the mono rocker “‘0′”.

Although Love Psychedelic Orchestra sounds like its predecessor on the surface, deep down it’s the album The Greatest Hits should have been — cohesive, tighter, focused.

Love Psychedelico has found its voice, and now the duo is refining their songwriting chops.

The ’60s have been over for what? 30 years now?

But as the recent chart-topping success of The Beatles #1 demonstrates, the third to the last decade of the previous millenium refuses to go into that good night.

So what to make of Love Psychedelico?

This duo from Japan are so enamoured of their Jefferson Airplane, Rolling Stones and Revolver-era Beatles records, lead singer KUMI even affects a British accent in her Japanese. They’ve even titled their debut album, The Greatest Hits.

Love Psychedelico so faithfully recreate a vintage sound, right down to wheezy organs, clanging klaviers and jangly, twangy guitars, it’s amazing to think anyone in the world would go so retro so hardcore. (Only the drum machines give them away as a modern band.)

Under unskilled hands, this kind of sound could result in true evil, but Love Psychedelico not only manage to avoid nostalgic gimmickery — they make their sound totally work.

Credit that to the group’s incredibly strong songwriting and KUMI’s soaring vocals. Tracks such as “Your Song”, “Lady Madonna”, “Moonly” and “Nostalgia ’69” never tire with repeated listenings.

Even when shades of the past get a bit too familiar — the chorus of “I miss you” is almost a note-for-note quote of “Ruby Tuesday” — Love Psychedelico never fall into the trap of blind hero worship.

If anything, the group has done the miraculous achievement of honoring the past by creating new works in that same idiom. Sort of like folk singers who aren’t afraid to set traditional Gaelic waulking songs to techno beats.

Brings new meaning to the term “idol pop.”