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 In a year once again populated by bands with animal names, hyper-folksters THE DODOS have pulled well ahead of the pack with their excellent release Visiter. With an impending visit to Australia to kick off the New Year, drummer LOGAN KROEBER tells MICHAEL PINCOTT about the perks of touring and translating studio songs to the live setting.
For a band named after flightless (and extinct) birds, the Dodos sure do get around. Their second full-length, Visiter, was released in the US in March, and since then the wave of success they’ve been riding has grown larger and larger. As the critical acclaim has flowed (including from this magazine via this writer), so has their touring schedule increased. But Kroeber, alongside guitarist/vocalist Meric Long and additional live member Joe Haener, is finally enjoying some time off. In addition to their US touring they’ve had a lengthy jaunt through Europe and Canada before returning for another run along the US East Coast. No doubt rather tired on the other end of the line, Kroeber is enjoying some time off in Rutherford, near San Francisco.
“I’m overlooking a beautiful field … I’ve been on a ranch the last couple of days. This is probably the largest break we’ve had in some time. It’s good to get some downtime.”
One almost feels bad tearing him away from such a tranquil scene just so that he can take part in an unforgiving Australian summer in the New Year. Almost. I ask Kroeber for a highlight of the band’s European stint, but my answer came from Kroeber the punter and not Kroeber the drummer. More specifically, Kroeber the My Bloody Valentine fan.
“It was at a festival in Ireland called Electric Picnic. My girlfriend had joined us at that point and so after our show we got to go run around and go see My Bloody Valentine. If you love a band who don’t exist for most of your life,” Kroeber says, “You sort of imagine the best way to see them. How you would hope they would be, how the audience would react. It fit exactly all those things for me. They were killing it on the stage and the crowd was just elated and jumping around and dancing.”
On the other end of the scale, Kroeber also had some admiration for one of the smaller bands The Dodos played with on tour.
“There was a band called Farmers Market who were like a gypsy folk band and I’d never heard of them before. We missed their set on stage but after the show they just started playing outside. They were so inspirational. Everyone there started gathering around. They were just playing for fun and it was obvious. I love having that ritual of playing with another band and hearing their songs before or after you play, it gets you amped up.”
Having toured Visiter for most of the year, I ask Kroeber how well the audiences are getting to know the album.
“We have some songs that people respond to because we have a video for them. We have a video for Fools and people watch it on the internet and we get a reaction. But it’s cool that the more we play, it’s the songs that haven’t had that exposure that people react more strongly to. On the UK club tour, people really responded to the song Winter. That would be the song that people would start clapping along to, and I found that weird because even though it has a fast pace it starts out a little bit mellow. It’s cool when lesser-known songs become fan favourites. It’s unexpected.”
It’s easy to understand why. Visiter is packed with strong tracks; its consistency is one of the reasons it’s so well regarded, especially for a longish album (clocking in at around sixty minutes without a dull moment), but Winter still stands out. It might be because of the general catchiness of the song, I reason. Perhaps it’s the lyrics … I still feel that the line “My friends they understand me better, but they don’t whisper goodnight. I want a lover and a sister but we know that’s not right.” is one of the best lyrics of the year. Wait, I know! It’s that incredibly smooth (and a little bit sexy) horn hook!
“Ohh, sometimes we don’t have the horn hook,” says Kroeber. “We don’t always have a trombone on hand. We sort of rearrange the song where Joe will play the melody on piano and expose some melodies that are sort of buried in the mix on the album. When we do festivals the festival people provide the instruments and so we were able to get a trombone. I don’t know if we’ll have a horn in Australia. Maybe we’ll try to procure one.”
Changing the make-up of tracks around isn’t purely done out of necessity for the Dodos. Sometimes it’s because the song has evolved over a number of shows; sometimes it’s just for fun.
“The Season is inherently flexible that way because there’s a long middle section that’s just kind of open and weird and we’ll be prone to just jamming and improvising during that time, so it takes on different shapes quite often.”
It can be hugely refreshing to go to a show and hear songs revamped and reworked, instead of studio carbon copies. If a song is strong enough, usually the carbon copy works just fine, especially if the band is good enough to insert the necessary oomph into the track. But sometimes (maybe even often) it’s just plain goddamn boring, for the punters AND for the band
Kroeber reinforces that crowd reaction plays a big part in the Dodo’s enjoyment of playing live, particularly in preventing any sense of boredom or complacency.
“It’s people who love the music that make it new for us. We’ve been playing these songs for a good long while but when we take ourselves to a new place where the record hasn’t been available for a long time or they haven’t seen us before it’s exciting for us. Having a good crowd reaction makes being on the road all worthwhile.”
While a two-piece on Visiter, the Dodos have brought on Joe Haener as a third man live, or as Kroeber describes him…
“I think of him as the vibraphone man. But he plays all the keyboard stuff, he plays the garbage for extra percussion. He’s been in the tour van the whole time, since about February, and he’s played every show. We haven’t had a lot of time to get to the creative side with him but he’s been very involved with the tour.”
Thankfully though the Dodos do have some new material gradually materializing.
“Yeah we’ve got one new song that’s totally complete that we’re playing live and we feel really good about it. We’ve got a bunch of other stuff that’s almost done, and Meric and I are hoping to get together soon to put some finishing touches on some of that and we can work it into the set. That’s sort of what we want to be doing right now, it’s taken a backseat to taking Visiter out on the road.”
And it’s lucky for us that it is in the backseat. If not, we might have been denied the chance to see quite possibly the best breakout band of 2008. What could be a better way to bring in the New Year than that?
You can fulfill your New Year’s resolution easily if you make it ‘Seeing THE DODOS.’ They play Friday Jan 2 at The Zoo, supported by Tragic/Athletic. VISITER is out now through Frenchkiss/Shock.
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