Finnish vocalist Olivia Merilahti and French multi-instrumentalist Dan Levy are nothing if not aware of other pop music. The best song on the duo's debut album as the Dø, 2008's A Mouthful, is a bittersweet rewriting of Etta James' walking-down-the-aisle standby "At Last", a take that makes the 1960 original sound inappropriately boastful by comparison-- not least by swapping out the classic song's orchestral swoon for understated, autumnal indie rock recalling Liz Phair, Mary Timony, or Sleater-Kinney. The first song on the album, "Playground Hustle", could be described as "M.I.A. and Kala Down by the Schoolyard." At Roskilde that year, I saw them cover Cee Lo Green's then-ubiquitous hit with Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy".
The Dø's sophomore album-- finally available worldwide after being released in some parts of Europe this past March-- keeps up the genre-hopscotching whimsicality of the debut while also urging us to approach music more innocently. The subtle difference is apparent from the best song on Both Ways Open Jaws, video selection "Too Insistent": Where "At Last!" holds back from excessively gloating about love, this song rejects our advances altogether; rather than smolder with melancholy, it perches Merilahti's elfin coo atop the kind of meticulously off-kilter, orchestral, and kids-choir uplift that makes Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago" or Jónsi's "Go Do" such hits with movie licensing dudes. The narrator compares herself to "a tiny toe," and questions "people who act like they think they have seen it all/ They're so indifferent." She's right and she's wrong; it's often easier to dismiss someone else's personal preference by labeling them as too-cool-for-school hipsters than it is to engage with the possibility they're right.
More often than not, the contradictions between the band's knowing appropriations and its calls against jaded cynicism resolve themselves in the album's intricately rewarding attention to rich and unexpected sonic details. As Both Ways Open Jaws traipses from the Tom Waits-via-Lykke Li boho-hobo hoedown of "Gonna Be Sick!" to charming electro-folk waltz "The Calendar", it makes plenty of detours for unlikely avant-pop percussion and warped vocal effects. There's even another kiddie-M.I.A. song, the tribal chirp of "Slippery Slope". On lilting, piano-cracked opener "Dust It Off", Merilahti claims, "Nothing has been before." Between the elegiac folkie guitars and electronic squelches of "The Wicked & the Blind", she adds, "Forget your knowledge/ Forget the past/ You were somehow born today." But it isn't that easy, is it? While this time around the Dø have covered another ubiquitous-in-2008 pop song-- Kings of Leon's breakthrough "Sex on Fire" in a recent BBC session-- it might be hard to hear the similarities in terms of head-slapping lowest-common-denominator commercial potential. Then again: Both Ways Open Jaws has teeth like a shark.
