HowWasTheShow Music Player (Beta):

This text will be replaced by the flash music player.

 
Latest posts in the Forum:

 
Please Visit Our Sponsors:

 

 

The Dodos - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

It seems almost pointless to add to the snowball of glowing reviews for The Dodos. The San Francisco duo’s Visiter release garnered an 8.5 rating from Pitchfork and an avalanche of good press has followed their herculean 2008 touring schedule. It would be pointless if they weren’t working so hard, and if they weren’t so goddamn good.

 

From the opening de-tuned deep twang of “Walking” on Visiter, Meric Long’s guitar is an insistent re-calibration of his predecessors, folk like Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. Long’s songwriting walks a lot of inquisitive ground, questions a lot of love and relationships and he draws out his plaintive voice to balance out his furious guitar playing. At the Triple Rock, Long sampled himself onstage to achieve the building layered effect, his precise warm, fast, fast, fast, finger picking losing none of its clarity and drive—the sampling of himself seemed like an organic growth process.

 

Logan Kroeber pushed the pace forward with his enormous, skittering, quaking drum set. Not the traditional set-up, Kroeber instead puts four toms at a single level, like a drum-line rig, in addition to his cymbals and high hat. He’s not just there for ornamentation or to tap out on the crash cymbal, Kroeber’s drums have a tectonic feel to them, shifting ground that Long’s melodies and vocals skip along with. A single listen to the double-time heartbeat of “Jodi,” and it is obvious that this a living symbiosis of sound. Joe Haener joined them on tour to round out the stage sound with a flourish, playing a trashcan, marimba, tiny piano and a large gong that he lifted like a rising sun.

 

Live, they played through much of the Visiter release as well as earlier material from their self-released Beware the Maniacs LP. Long would launch himself up from his chair while Kroeber would push the changes and Haener provided the final crash. Much of the show flowed together (as do the discs) giving what must be a well-rehearsed and practiced event an organic, spontaneous feel. Like the closing scene of the movie Adaptation, where the film is sped up to watch flowers on a median opening and closing with the sun, the Dodos slightly jagged looping patterns are undeniably strange, light and wonderful.

The Dodos: dodosmusic.net