The Dodos Are Very Much Alive and Well
By: Marc Z. Grub
November 5, 2009 – San Francisco, United States
The title of The Dodos' most recent album—the trio's third full-length—is Time To Die. It begins with a song called "Small Deaths" and ends with "A Time To Die". But that doesn't mean lead singer/songwriter Meric Long is a 12-year-old emo kid.
"Well, it's not really meant to be depressing or morbid," he says. "Basically the phrase just kind of came from the idea of kind of going into something where there was a lot of pressure and a lot expectation. It's just sort of a phrase to try and dispel the feeling of being afraid of failure. It's basically something that I joke around with... that I say before I do anything that's possibly humiliating or excruciating."
And that might be helpful given that there was a certain level of external pressure on the band as they prepared the record. Their 2008 album, Visiter, received the covetous Best New Music designation from the all-mighty Pitchfork, gaining the band a lot of attention within indie rock spheres. Their song "Fools" was also featured in a Miller Chill commercial.
"That record came out and was reviewed while we were touring and as the tour went on the shows started to get a little better attended... But I would say that was probably the biggest step up, when [the Pitchfork review] happened."
Long is quick to point out, though, that the trio's own ambitions and expectations provided them with the most pressure.
"Visiter did well but it wasn't like a crazy record that people's expectations were going to be ridiculous. It was just more like this pressure we had put on ourselves."
The Dodos began as Dodo Bird, a solo project for Long. After playing in bands in high school, mainly an "experimental funk thing", he began focusing on acoustic guitar, trying to learn how to play country-blues style fingerpicking and writing songs that way. He intended to start a band at some point, though with only a few members for practical monetary reasons ("it kind of seems impossible these days to make any money when you have five or six people"), but he wanted to be sure to find the right people.
"I started playing shows around San Francisco and I was just hoping that if I played out enough the right person would come along and it kind of worked out, actually."
In 2005, he began playing with drummer Logan Kroeber and they soon changed the name of the group to The Dodos. The acoustic guitar/drums duo managed to record and self-release the full-length Beware Of The Maniacs while building a nice little following before being signed in 2007 by French Kiss, with whom they released Visiter.
In 2009 they added third member, vibraphonist Keaton Snyder, expanding the band's sound and changing its personal dynamic.
"On Visiter it was like two instruments, guitar and drums, and then we had all these other instruments lying around like pianos, toy pianos, cellos and trash cans and we just threw that on top. For this record we wanted to have less instrumentation. So we wanted to find one instrument that could kind of cover all those bases. The vibraphone did a pretty good job of it because it's percussive and it also carries tone, so it can either be played more with the drums or more with the guitar. We wanted to have another person in the mix for quite some time but it was just a matter of finding the right instrument and finding another person that could play it."
For Time To Die, the band recorded with the so-hot-right-now producer Phil Ek, who has worked with Built To Spill, Les Savy Fav, The Shins, Band Of Horses and Fleet Foxes. It seems to have been a good decision; at a trim eight tracks (in comparison to Visiter's lengthy fourteen), Time To Die finds The Dodos sounding sharper, stronger and more melodic than ever.
Video: "Fools" by The Dodos
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