The Dodos: ‘Visiter’

Marry a tuneful dirge of strummings and vocals to the sound of someone beating the crap out of a bag of cutlery, pots and pans, and you’ve got it: The Dodos. ‘Industrial folk’. Flippin’ brilliant.

‘Red And Purple’ is a case in point. Percussionist Logan Kroeber apparently strapped tambourines to his shoes for this one, creating a noise akin to a high speed steam train. The other half of the San Franciso duo, guitarist Meric Long, adds to the clatter with the speed and rhythm of his open tuned guitar. So far so ‘interesting’ – but what makes this record a more sophisticated delight is a sweet chorus (“Come and join us in the trenches, red and purple by our sides”), the way the toy piano carries the tune, and the appearance of a fuzzy blues groove guitar and cavernous backing vocal.

There’s a lot of the Elephant Six collective’s influence at play. The fuzz acoustic owes one to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, and the horns on ‘Winter’ are classic Beirut. There are echoes of the retro experimentalism of Yeasayer and Akron/Family. But three albums in, you’d expect a band to have found their own niche, and the Dodos have. The melodies are just so strong.

Sure, stuff is beaten and bashed excitingly on many of the tracks. Pleasingly fuzzy guitars are thrashed, and mixed up with mandolin, banjo, slide. There are attention-grabbing yelps and shouts galore, sudden endings, odd echoes - at times seemingly all on one song (‘Joe’s Waltz’). But most bands would kill for just one of the hooks that ‘Fools’, for example, has at least four of.

Maybe if those 17th-century island colonists had been dancing around to this, instead of setting pigs free and running amok with clubs, The Dodos may have survived. Long live industrial folk. Long live The Dodos.

Released on 14th July 2008 by Wichita Recordings.

Live on SIRIUS, June 07