Permutations

When I visit Manhattan, I often have the impression that I am seeing the same 7 or 8 people over and over again:  The skinny-jeaned hipster, the girl with the teddy bear hat, the confused asian tourist...   It's as though these archetypes wander across my field of vision and then race off stage to change their shoes and put on a different necklace, maybe a wig, before they are shuttled up to the the next block to reappear in their new permutation.  It's a feeling I don't get anywhere else - I suppose when you have 8 million people packed into such a small area, the need to establish one's identity at a glance becomes a matter of tribal membership.  How else could you maintain your sense of self when you live with in a mile of more people than a human being would typically meet in a lifetime throughout most of history?

It's a digression, I know, but I have this same feeling of reappearing permutations when I listen to "No Color," The Dodos third album, especially comparing it back to their first.  The core remains the same, while the particulars are rearranged - folk rhythms (particularly celtic drumming, to my ear), highly percussive guitar work, short melodic phrasing and repetitions that treat the vocal track almost as a drum in itself - these are always consistent, while the particulars are reconfigured from track to track, and even within a song. Intentionally or not, it seems to borrow from Ornette Coleman's idea of harmolodic music, where every instrument carries melody and percussion with equal weight.  This same idea was a direct influence of Soul Coughing, and I hear much the same effect in Rodrigo y Gabriela's virtuosic guitar work on 11:11, though all of these bands have (thankfully) dropped Coleman's atonalism.

Done well, this aesthetic is energetic and engaging, and The Dodos certainly do it well.  Meric Long's guitar work is forceful and precise, working equally well for finger-picked acoustic lines and the occasional driving electric shred.  Logan Kroeber melds his syncopated drum work seamlessly with the guitar, complementing Long's own rhythmic play.  But the style can also be limiting.  The emphasis on percussion is sometimes to the detriment of melody - each of Meric Long's vocal and guitar lead lines are beautiful, but he often constrains them to repeat a very exact motif over a couple bars, which leaves little room for harmonic or melodic development.  Instead, The Dodos create forward motion by switching across distinct sections of short, repeated rhythmic, harmonic and melodic motifs - changing clothes when our heads are turned, but returning as much the same person we saw a moment before.  This is actually a distinct improvement on Visiter,  where Long and Kroeber sometimes let each section persist for all or most of the song - no matter how good those two bars are, they just can't sustain an entire song.

The album is at it's best when Logan and Kroeber give their creations just a little space to breathe, particularly on "Companions" and "Don't Try and Hide It," where the duo allow the patterns to mutate and shift less precisely. Neko Case's appearance on the latter track is extremely welcome - I often prefer Case's work on other artist's albums, where the unusual but beautiful character of her voice adds potency, where on its own it can be a bit intense.   Kroeber's lead lines on the electric guitar are also particularly good in that song.  There's also real melodic development in "When Will You Go?", and (in another clothes-changing moment) there's a certain 60's folk-pop influence to the vocals, much like my favorite track on Visiter, "Ashley," which for some reason that I will never fully understand, always makes me think of Mrs Robinson in the The Graduate.

While I do think it would benefit if The Dodos relaxed their precision just a bit more, the highlights of this album are incredibly rewarding, though I found it took a couple listens before they started to reveal themselves.