Listening to Aussie trio Wolfmother’s new album is like watching “Fantasia” while baked out of your mind – pink elephants are dancing, an army of brooms is on the march, and all you can do is sit and giggle at the sheer awesomeness of the situation.

Wolfmother, the band’s first full-length album, is a completely over-the-top adventure through ’70s rock and roll. There are songs about unicorns, sorcerers and witchcraft, there are flute solos, and there are monolithic rock riffs so big they could barely fit through the door of the recording studio. (The same could be said for singer Andrew Stockdale’s righteous fro.)

On paper, there’s no way that half of the elements on this record should work, but the strange fact is that they do. Wolfmother manages to mash up Led Zeppelin’s sex appeal and love for all things hobbit with Black Sabbath’s ability to take a simple three-chord riff and rock it out like the fate of Middle Earth depended on it.

“When we first came up with the first batch of songs for Wolfmother, we were like, ‘Oh my god! This is the most stupid music in the world! We’re going to get ridiculed!’” says drummer Myles Heskett. “But we didn’t really care. We were just having fun. I think you’ve gotta take risks to make something interesting.”

On Wolfmother, the band has done a delicate thing; they’ve managed to mine the mountains of classic rock without ending up sounding like a novelty act trying to revive vintage rock (The Darkness), or even worse – a novelty act trying to revive vintage rock and then pretending like they’re not (Jet).

Wolfmother have done something closer to what Jack White has done with blues-rock; they’re using the basic premise of classic rock, but they’ve taken ownership of it. They’re as much Queens of the Stone Age as anything that came from the ’70s. Wolfmother’s sound is simply what came out when these three guys plugged in their amps. They weren’t trying to sound vintage, and they certainly weren’t trying to revive classic rock.

“Yeah, we thought we’d single-handedly bring back rock. That was the main plan!” Heskett laughs.

“No, we just liked that sound. We just locked ourselves away and jammed to come up with some cool songs. We’d all swap around instruments. It was a bit of a mess, really. No focus,” he explains. “So we decided to strip everything back and go with a rock style, because that’s exciting and that’s energetic and that’s a lot of fun. But we didn’t really think about what anyone else was doing or whether what we were doing would be different. We were just kind of having fun.”

The music is fun, for sure, and when you factor in lyrics like, “Go and see the sorcerer/look into the ball/you may find the answer/written on the wall,” it’s hard not to giggle. Wolfmother’s been characterized as “The Darkness without the irony,” which is fair enough. But while Stockdale may not be singing about things like badminton and genital warts (see The Darkness’ “Growing On Me”), there is still more of a wink in his words than, say, when Robert Plant sings about meeting a girl in the darkest depths of Mordor.

“I think we’ve got a sense of humor, for sure. I think you’ve gotta have a sense of humor and it’s gotta be fun,” Heskett says. “There’s a fine line between having a sense of humor and being fun, and being cheesy and too over-the-top. You gotta walk the line. You don’t want to be boring, but you don’t want to be ridiculous.”

Back home, the boys of Wolfmother are already rock superstars. In two short years, they’ve gone from playing in their garage to playing festivals to crowds of 15,000. Wolfmother has already gone double-platinum in Australia and, if the band’s Top 40 Billboard debut last month is any indication, these Aussies might soon have American audiences howling at the moon as well.

“It’s so much more than what we set out to do. So everything from now on is a bonus,” Heskett exclaims. “Just meeting so many cool people, traveling the world and playing music – I did a bunch of shitty jobs, had shitty bosses. Whenever you’re feeling a bit down or depressed on the road, you just think about, ‘I could be back there with that shitty boss!’ I’m traveling the world playing music. You can’t really beat that.

“This isn’t going to happen again, so I’m just trying to enjoy the moment,” he says. “I’m just trying to get through this year.”