The Dodos are a San Fransisco guitar-drum duo who are nothing like The White Stripes. In fact, The Dodos should never even be mentioned in the same sentence as The White Stripes, because The Dodos don’t even sound - or look - similar to The White Stripes. But if there is anything that we’ve learned in the past from listening to these kinds of bands that we love, it’s that in order to be a good guitar-drum duo you need to have excessive amounts of energy, musical passion, and showmanship. You have to have at least enough to make up for those “missing” members, if not more. So then it’s particularly important to mention that The Dodos generate enough energy in their live shows to power all the homes, heated pools, and air conditioners in all of California, and they’ve got musical passion and showmanship to spare. When they hit the studio earlier this year to record their latest album, Visiter, their goal was to bottle all that live-show intensity and distill it into a potent spirit for your eardrums. Some might say you can’t bottle that kind of thing, but I would say that just trying to do it makes for a pretty interesting album. More after the jump….

Visiter puts The Dodos on the cutting edge of progressive folk – I would even be tempted to call it power folk. Before joining singer Meric Long to form Dodobird – their first incarnation of the band name - drummer Logan Kroeber was a fervent student of progressive metal. Long was a folkie who had studied complex percussive musical forms such as West African Ewe drumming. The result of this marriage of influences is often fast, fierce, and manic. Sometimes on Visiter you can almost hear the froth flinging from the corner of their mouths and the sweat flying from their brows. At some points, a song will actually descend into a cacophonic rage of insane screaming and frantic strumming and drum-pounding. But this is, above all, a folk album.

Visiter opens with perhaps the most memorable song of the album, a dreamy, melodic banjo-based foot stomper called “Walking”, short but sweet at only two minutes long. From there The Dodos kick it into thrummy, galloping goodness with “Red and Purple”, followed soon after by another definitive track from the album. “Fools” is repetitive and somewhat crazed, like many of their songs. But perhaps because it achieves just the right balance of melodic strumming and nonchalant vocals with locomotive percussion and the occasional distorted yell, it stands out as a superb track. “Paint The Rust”, a highlight of their live shows (according to brockmasterflex who actually got to see them), sees singer/guitarist breaking out his hillbilly slide-blues riffs. But it isn’t the strongest song on the album. It’s just that, without feeling those sonic waves blasting from the loudspeakers and watching the band thrash around under flashing lights, you get a sense that what you’re hearing is a muted version. But hey, at least they tried, and it still does sound pretty cool.

The Dodos achieved what they set out to do with Visiter, but hopefully the experience will prove to them that while some songs may be great live, they may not be as great on record, and vise versa. So maybe when we hear from them next time around (and we will – sorry for the easy pun but they won’t be going extinct any time soon), they’ll have recorded more songs that sound fantastic on an album and less songs that sound like muted versions. Visiter proves they’re capable, and with those fierce live shows The Dodos will continue to be a guitar-drum duo to be reckoned with.

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