Plumbiferous Media

San Fran­cisco indie group The Dodos was formed in 2005 as Dodo Bird. Six years, one name change, and three LPs later (one crit­i­cally acclaimed, one less so, and one too early to be noticed), the band released its newest album, No Color. No Color is an evo­lu­tion from Time to Die’s mixed suc­cess into a more care­ful sound for The Dodos. It’s not an entirely suc­cess­ful evo­lu­tion, but it is one that leaves us with an often intrigu­ing album.

Meric Long’s voice, which often seems in pos­ses­sion of an almost con­ver­sa­tional tone, falls into a very reg­u­lar pat­tern through No Color. This makes for a clear sound that cer­tainly accents the album’s instru­men­tals, but which at the same time is almost entirely pre­dictable. Is that a fair trade­off? Well, that depends on whether it’s bet­ter to have vari­ety or con­cor­dance. In this case, since The Dodos occa­sion­ally suf­fer from issues with rep­e­ti­tion, it might have been bet­ter to lean towards vari­ety - but that doesn’t make Long’s approach a fail­ure. Instead, it sim­ply pre­vents it from work­ing as well as it could have, and Neko Case’s con­tri­bu­tions, as well as vocal accents such as “Black Night“‘s yelps, go a ways towards keep­ing every­thing interesting.

Lyri­cal depth is not one of The Dodos’ strengths. Instead, they tend to bet­ter at wield­ing imagery and the sound of words than actual mean­ing. Lines like “This takes us by sur­prise, I’m sure / Are you the curse? / Are you the cure?” sound inter­est­ing, but don’t really go any­where - although that’s not really the point. To a large extent, they’re there to aug­ment the band’s sound. Espe­cially with the oft-repeated hooks, the point of No Color’s lyrics seems to be more to cre­ate a gen­eral feel­ing about the album then to tell stories.

Gen­eral the­ory for any sort of per­for­mance or pro­duc­tion states that only the first and last bit make any sort of major impres­sion on the observer. Whether or not that is true for an album, it is inter­est­ing to note that No Color begins with (albeit fairly suc­cess­ful) almost excru­ci­at­ingly heavy drum­ming, tran­si­tion­ing into a unique and beau­ti­fully com­plex, if harsh, gui­tar line. The track as a whole works shock­ingly well - and tran­si­tions quite well into the sub­se­quent track - fully val­i­dat­ing the inter­est­ing choice of percussion.

Sim­i­larly inter­est­ing is the final track of the album. In fact, of the entire album, the last track most closely resem­bles the first in musi­cal com­plex­ity - at least of the gui­tar line. Through­out the album, The Dodos main­tained a high level of activ­ity, depth, and indi­vid­u­al­ity, but the begin­ning and end of the album are clearly the high points. In some sense, the track should be praised, indi­vid­u­ally, for its merit, but its sim­i­lar­ity to the first track makes it some­how less desirable.

If No Color were, as well as a deep album, a heav­ily diverse album, it would make a reca­pit­u­la­tion of the open­ing track more than pleas­ant, adding wel­come sym­me­try to the album. But The Dodos never really stray far from their orig­i­nal con­cepts. More than one track has heavy yet appro­pri­ate drum­ming, and the sim­i­lar­i­ties between tracks by no means stops there. Given that, the final track is fairly inap­pro­pri­ate, lack­ing much orig­i­nal­ity. No Color is an inter­est­ing album. While ‘pleas­ant’ may not be the best descrip­tor, it is cer­tainly enjoy­able in its own, fairly potent way.

This post is tagged 70-79, The Dodos