TANNARA YELLAND
Layout Editor

The Dodos have a very distinctive sound, and this is no accident.

“The idea of the band was just the sound of the acoustic guitar when it’s played really aggressively,” said frontman Meric Long in a recent interview with the Sheaf.

And in the beginning, there was very little other than that idea. Long and drummer Logan Kroeber created a sound full of heavy drumbeats and the aforementioned aggressive acoustic guitar. Once they added Long’s plaintive vocals, The Dodos had found their sound.

Despite the fact that the band was predicated on a specific guitar sound, Kroeber’s drumming is the first thing many listeners notice about The Dodos.

“Logan doesn’t play with a bass drum,” Long explained. “It forces him to play beats in a different way. He has to compensate.”

The duo has retained its unique sound for No Color, The Dodos’ fourth album. But they have begun to move toward a more conventional set up. Concert attendees will no longer see two young men on stage with one drum set and an acoustic guitar; they tour with a third member and have two electric guitars in addition to the standby acoustic.

Long says his choice to use an acoustic guitar in the beginning led him to play with more open tuning and to favour certain chords over others, which are still evident on the new album.

Indeed, with No Color, Long and Kroeber seem to have continued doing what they already mastered rather than expand into new territory simply for expansion’s sake. The result is another strong album you find yourself tapping along to almost immediately, and humming after only one or two listens.

“Probably the biggest factor was time,” Long said of changes in their recording process. “We had a lot more time with this one in the studio.”

The band began recording immediately after a tour, taking advantage of being well rehearsed and in the habit of playing together. After that, they had a month and a half to work on the album, refining the original recordings to create the exact sound they wanted to release.

“It resulted in us playing a lot of other instruments, but also cutting a lot of instruments out,” Long said. “We were just thinking about the songs as they are and trying to play them the way we wanted them to sound rather than exactly how they sounded live.”

For longtime fans of The Dodos, the few times that electric guitar is noticeably audible on No Color is a bit of a shock. However, Long’s signature heavy strumming and finger-picking — Long prefers to play with his fingers rather than playing with a guitar pick — are far more common on the album. For the most part the new instruments add a richly textured sound on top of the band’s traditional sound.

The Dodos play Amigos March 26 with Reading Rainbow.