Record Review: The Dodos: Visiter

On their second album (and first on French Kiss), the San Francisco duo offer up intimate, exuberant psych-folk gems like they’re going out of style, resulting in one of the best indie albums this year.

Rating: 4/5

Magnetic Fields’ Distortion will take the prize for most accurately titled record of 2008, but the Dodos’ came up with a perfect title of their own for their sophomore record. Visiter is a warm, inviting, unassuming, happy-that-you’re-listening, come-on-in-and-have-some-cookies affair, one that even during its more solemn moments still can’t contain its ebullience. We’re visiting our favorite relative minus the inconvenience of travel, and our favorite relative is, uh, offering gorgeous, addictive indie folk to celebrate our arrival.

The Dodos brings to mind some of the best indie bands of recent years, recalling the Microphones’ intimate, homespun aesthetic and both Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs-era acoustic craziness and that band’s more recent, “Purple Bottle”-type percussive backbone. Thinking back even farther, the lovesick “Winter” and the precious “Undeclared” bring to mind Magnetic Fields minus the synths, and, like many a modern left-of-center folk act, the Dodos have a little bit of Neutral Milk Hotel in them.

Well then, what makes the Dodos so special? Above all, while this album’s acoustic guitar-drum sound is a bare, straightforward one, guitarist/singer Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber are distinctly in tune with each other’s every musical impulse, with Kroeber’s percussion constantly propelling Long’s already lively strumming to even greater levels of unhinged zest. At the same time, Kroeber smartly steps back and leaves the brief, more contained ditties “Walking” and “Undeclared” for Long to handle solo. Kroeber’s drumming makes an impact, but never as the center-of-attention, and rather as an underlying force, perfectly setting the limelight on Long’s catchy acoustic trickery and infectious vocal melodies.

While the two Dodos work superbly together, Visiter sounds undoubtedly like the work of two musicians. John Madden-like obviousness since, yeah, it’s the work of two people, but a point nonetheless worth emphasizing, because this makes for a very uniform sound…one that might be a little too uniform for some listeners. The duo occasionally adds some horns to the drum-guitar arrangements, but there’s little sonic variation on Visiter. Yet, the Dodos excellently compensate for the homogeneous blueprint with their relentless energy and by effectively alternating between quicker, fleeting numbers and freewheeling epics.

The latter category gets to claim the album’s best track, the six-plus minute “Jodi.” The attentive blog-surfer will recognize it as one of the two pre-release tracks from Visiter (along with the uber-catchy “Fools”), and, unsurprisingly, nothing on the rest of the album upstages it. The song was the first thing from the Dodos that caught my attention, and, with its instantly memorable chorus and the Avey Tare-like hollering during the closing minute, stands as one of my favorite songs of 2008 thus far.

The Dodos aren’t the kind of crossover, blog-to-MTV band like, let’s say, Vampire Weekend, but Visiter doesn’t really want to be shared with the world anyway. “Jodi” and “Fools” and “Winter” and “Red and Purple” are made for campfires, not for stadiums. Return home at your own risk.

The Dodos - Jodi

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