New York, NY (Top40 Charts) The Dodos share the new singles "With A Guitar" and "Pale Horizon". The songs are off their forthcoming record Grizzly Peak, due out November 12th.
For over 15 years, The Dodos have been careening, almost recklessly, towards some perfect ideal of how The Dodos should sound. First formed with the intention of creating a record that felt and sounded how the inside of a guitar might, the band have spent the intervening years sprinting towards that platonic ideal.
On their eighth album Grizzly Peak, Meric Long and Logan Kroeber still play as if in freefall, but things are different this time. Meditative and sometimes painful in its emotional excavation, over the course of ten anthemic, gorgeously-rendered tracks, Grizzly Peak reveals itself as that place Long and Kroeber were always desperately trying to find.
As he was toying with the beginnings of what would become Grizzly Peak, Long began to feel the early twinges of arthritis in his fingers. Anyone familiar with Long's style - an aggressive, rhythmic, weighted approach to fingerpicking developed and perfected over the past 15 years - will understand that this is akin to a runner feeling their legs wear down beyond repair, or the lungs of a brass player beginning to atrophy: an unfair, natural decay that bears immense, life-changing weight.
"Guitar has always been my ticket out from feeling worthless, insecure - perhaps I never quite grew out of that moment in my adolescence where I discovered playing the guitar made me feel better than what my mind or others told me," Long says. Hence the poignancy of the new single "With A Guitar" in which Long ends the song by singing "I never had much to say but I always said it with a guitar."
Although The Dodos have always been a band enamored, somewhat, with the idea of what it means to be 'The Dodos' - a duo for whom their own music provides inspiration enough - Grizzly Peak is, perhaps, the first Dodos record to look back, to take stock of Long and Kroeber's life as one entity.
Complex, heart-on-sleeve reckoning - with selfhood as well as relationships with others - recurs throughout the album. The songs are emotionally generous but resolute in their aim to pull apart even the most tightly-coiled of emotions. Long says no stone was left unturned in his quest to make Grizzly Peak sound like the inside of a guitar, and the same feels true of the record's emotional content; this is The Dodos laid bare, with nothing to hide.
