TheDodos

Rhythm on the Road

By Andres Jauregui
Photos by Mathew Scott

A Pitchfork reviewer once quipped that The Dodos would make any headline writer’s job easy, should they ever break up.

Hold that thought. Given the San Francisco duo’s fortuitous creativity, it’s doubtful that The Dodos’ singer/guitarist Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber will be going the way of their namesake anytime soon. Their inspiration and boundless gumption yielded an album’s worth of material, not by design, but as a foil to boredom while on the road.

“Guitars sound really good in the van,” Kroeber says. “We’d park somewhere, wasting time. When I think back to how a number of the songs were written, I can still see Meric in the rearview mirror, ripping away.”

“We rarely stayed in motels [while on tour] but when we did, we’d stay up most of the night and have a jam session. I remember being really exhausted, but I don’t really remember having to force things at all,” Long says. “There’s so much free time that if I were to tour around playing the same songs and just get drunk every night, I’d lose my brain. I’ve got to have something new to keep my sanity.”

Dropping in and out of San Francisco for the better part of a year during their three national tours for debut album Beware of the Maniacs (2006), The Dodos capitalized on their downtime while on the road to meditate on the sound that they’d captured on their first record.

“When we finished Beware of the Maniacs, we had just begun to fully understand what we were doing. So we figured with all that spark and momentum, we had to go back with a new batch of songs. It totally worked out. We weren’t fooling around anymore. We had a vision that we could totally go for,” Kroeber says.

Drawing on influences as far ranging as West African Ewe (pronounced ay-way) drumming, Balinese gamelan music, and good ol’ American country blues fingerpicking, The Dodos’ new album Visiter — out last month on Frenchkiss Records - grows and refines the syncopated rhythmic interplay that is the signature of the band’s live performance.

“I’m not a drummer, but I wish I was a drummer,” Long says. “In gamelan, the drumming is the lead instrument. The timekeepers are the bells and the instruments that would otherwise make the melody, and the drums are the ones that will go freeform and do solos. When I write guitar parts, I’m thinking about the drums, because I want to keep the drums central.”

Returning to the Type Foundry studio with engineer John Askew, the band literally picked up where it left off, then pushed itself farther than ever. Seeking a live sound for Visiter, the band experimented with microphone placement and capturing ambient noise, and laid down the primary guitar and drum tracks without extensive overdubbing.

“Beware of the Maniacs was a lot more mellow than the shows we were putting together, so for Visiter we wanted to capture the energy we put out when we play live,” Long says. “None of us [neither the band, nor Askew] were into the idea of having a lot of post production, so we recorded to tape, threw it onto ProTools, and then just kind of left it the way it was. We focused on making it sound the way we wanted it to sound on the tape before we did anything to it.”

Like the warehouse studio in which it was recorded, there is space to the album’s sound, room to roam. The very first track, “Walking,” with its choral refrain about wanderlust, sets the thematic mood for Visiter. The elements at play often seem to journey about. Long fingerpicks his way through many songs on both banjo and guitar, but sheds delicacy in favor of lighting-quick blues licks on scorchers like “Jodi.” There’s a softer, dreamier side on “Ashley.” Horns dominate the interlude on “It’s That Time Again.” And there’s the curious, tropical rhythms of “Red and Purple,” which features Kroeber on toy piano and lyrics about receiving ornately wrapped gifts while out on tour.

“We wrote ‘Red and Purple’ while we were on the road in Chicago, and it was kind of the tour song,” Long says. “I’d been receiving packages from a girl in San Francisco, and we’d arrive at each venue to find packages waiting for us, wrapped in like pomegranate paper. So the song was inspired by that, and my community, and my communication with her. It’s a snapshot of where we were on tour.”
A snapshot of where The Dodos are at now, Visiter is a far cry from the proto-Dodos days of Dodoman, Long’s guitar-and-drum machine solo project. The Dodos, and Visiter in particular, are a far more collective effort.

“I know where Meric is coming from. When we make stuff up, I know the kind of syncopation that he likes to have, and I keep that in mind,” Kroeber says.
“And Logan definitely makes it his own,” Long adds. “He’s a really big drummer. He hits those things like a monster. It’s good because we use his drumming to fill in the space where there’d be other instruments, normally. Like we don’t have a bass in the band, so all the bottom end of our sound has to come from Logan’s drumming. He’s got these really big, booming toms that ring out.”

“There’s a lot of bands out there right now that are into a big drum sound,” Kroeber points out. “Deerhoof is one of our favorites, although they’re much, much more than just great drumming ... I’d call them an influence.”

With a road map’s worth of reference points to myriad influences, The Dodos have proved themselves capable of charting unfamiliar terrain with both poise and power. With two albums under their belt and a clear vision for their sound, The Dodos have found a good rhythm.

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