Album Review : The Dodos – Time To Die
- Written by Andrew Schagen
I’m not embarrassed to admit that I still love the Pop Will Eat Itself song ‘Wake up! Time to Die!”. I probably haven’t heard it played for about a decade but I can still hum you the chorus. Similarly, It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen Bladerunner, but that line “Wake Up! Time to Die!” delivered with such gleeful venom by Leon the rogue android will probably stay with me until I die. In stark contrast to thisTime to Die, the new Dodos album, is utterly forgettable. I’ve listened to this record at least twice a day for the last week but I honestly can’t recall much about it.
The sound of the album is (breathe) polite indie and it remains so unvaryingly throughout. The sound is that of a few young men enjoying playing their music, but ultimately without anything whatsoever to say. You feel like this should be a very promising time for The Dodos: the popularity of bands like Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear with whom they loosely share a musical bracket (and a penchant for animal names) should give them a leg up to success. Unfortunately there is none of Fleet Foxes soaring anthemic quality or, for example, Bon Iver’s yearning lyricism; nothing to raise this record out of the ‘bog standard’ camp or to make it live up to its predecessor, the far superior ‘Visiter’.
One of The Dodos’ selling points is their unusual musical set-up: Logan Krueber’s bizarre drum kit and Meric Long’s training in west African rhythms should, you feel, combine to give you something a little out of the ordinary. Yet ‘the ordinary’ is exactly where they remain, and they seem to be quite comfortable there, making no real effort to escape ordinariness.
The lyrics are a case in point. ‘The Strums’ contains lines such as "yeah they say that they want you, when they don’t" and "get your Daddy’s gun" which sound so generic that they could be from any polite indie record of the last fifteen years. The lyrics don’t tend to intrude at all except with the odd clunky rhyme: "Children kill your teachers/kill your pets/then kill your preachers" and throughout are delivered with the same unvarying delivery as if no line has any more importance or significance than any other.
Sometimes it can be difficult to find a record to put on that won’t bother other listeners. If you are looking for a record to put on in the background that no-one else will find objectionable then Time to Die is exactly what you need. But if you are looking for more than pretty aural wallpaper then look elsewhere.