On its warm and reflective new album, the Bay Area duo offers the most plainly pretty songs of its career. The stakes are high but the mood is anything but tense.
The Dodos’ music moves in lean, agile sweeps, like a conversation between two friends who know each other well enough to develop their own shorthand. Whether on stage or on record, singer and guitarist Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber appear equally relaxed in their brisk exchanges, matching each other’s stoicism to the point that it’s easy to overlook the speed, stamina, and sharpness of their dialogue. There’s a lot of movement between them, little of it wasted, much of it flying under the radar. These qualities also apply to the path of the band itself. Over their 15 years together, and especially since the indie-folk duo’s beloved sophomore LP, Visiter, their consistency has been easy to take for granted.
This history comes into focus on Grizzly Peak, the band’s warm and vaguely elegiac eighth album, which could also be their last one. As Long recently revealed in an NPR story by Pitchfork contributor Grayson Haver Currin, he’s been afflicted by rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps exacerbated over the years by his athletic playing style. Though its lyrics don’t explicitly point to finality, Grizzly Peak sounds like a concerted burst of creative energy on approach to a resting point. The stakes are high, but the mood is anything but tense: Similar to the last album by the Walkmen, another remarkably consistent band with whom the Dodos once shared stages, there’s a hint of celebration within the big-hearted charge, manifested in some of the most plainly pretty songs the band has ever made.
Long kicks off the album on a reflective note: “Slowing down was not what I had planned/But here we are,” he sings over light touches of bouncing orchestral strings on “Annie,” as un-frantic a song as the Dodos have opened an album with since Visiter’s “Walking.” When Kroeber’s drums enter during the chorus, his hits are spacious and gigantic—basically the opposite of the intricate, scampering patterns that he and Long honed into the Dodos’ rhythmic fingerprint. Those trademarks appear on Grizzly Peak, too, but by the time that the hushed waltz “The Atlantic” comes in with a pattering, barely detectable beat under a solitary synth, there’s an inescapable sense that things are different this time: less hurried, as if slowing down to reassess the big picture. Long’s words, gently sung at near-lullaby volume, don’t exactly dispel that feeling: “I’m talking low but I’m thinking loud/Should I get away from this?”
Despite their consistent two-man core, it’s been a long time since the Dodos have sounded like only two people on an entire album, having developed a taste for selective overdubs on their Phil Ek-produced third LP, Time to Die. On Grizzly Peak, produced by Long, the song structures are simpler (with at least one notable exception in the crooked, vintage-Dodos skitter of “Quiet Voices”), but the additional frills remain: Strings, synths, and novel effects enter to usher songs around a corner. On “The Surface,” a satisfying harmony breaks out between two voicings of the same acoustic guitar: one with a crystal-clear fidelity and one that sounds so compressed it’s unrecognizable. This kind of production choice might come off as gratuitous to those who love the direct, in-the-room feeling of “Confidence” or “Undeclared,” but Long gives each additional piece a careful, prolonged spotlight that suggests they have meaning that not everyone will hear.
As poignant as it would have been to hear the Dodos revert to a live, strictly two-man setup, these lighter songs aren’t smothered by an occasional extra layer. Sometimes, they make the song: Halfway through “Sustainer,” Long spills a couple raspy electric guitar chords over the song’s ticking, delicate acoustic frame, creating a thin sheet of distortion offset by the elegance of a few bright piano chords in the final minute. “I know what you want, but I don’t know if I can give it back,” he sings, and it’s as close to pure sadness as the band allows themselves on Grizzly Peak; “Hopeless isn’t a place I can be,” he concludes seconds later, resolved and without hesitation.
Since veering away from his more sing-songy and diaristic early work, Long’s lyrics have hovered between specificity and abstraction. This evolution led to a new weapon for his songwriting: stepping fully onto the “specific” end for one isolated moment, emboldening a lyric through contrast. One of those moments punctuates “With a Guitar,” when Long acknowledges how ingrained his instrument has become in his identity: “I never had much to say, but I always said it with a guitar.” It might seem pedestrian, but when framed by Grizzly Peak’s constant allusions to rest, zooming out, and looking back, his words feel levels deep. Distilling the feeling of being intuitively drawn to a craft and shortchanging his own skills as a lyricist, it’s a line good enough to have sustained the song all on its own (although the preceding line, “I guess I’ll have to fight you with a guitar,” is pretty funny, too). If Grizzly Peak is indeed a resting point for the Dodos, it’s comforting to hear that they’re still smiling as they ease up.
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