The titles of the previous three Dodos records-- Visiter, Time to Die, No Color-- provide an unfortunate and eerie foreshadowing for the band’s fifth LP Carrier. It’s the San Francisco duo’s most subdued and solemn album, inspired by the passing of guitarist Christopher Reimer, who joined Dodos for a brief period between his departure from Women and his death at the age of 26 in 2012. Though Reimer doesn’t play on Carrier, he’s a spiritual and musical inspiration that guides Meric Long and Logan Kroeber throughout, an incorporeal third member that still holds the most influence over the record’s direction. The short time in Reimer’s presence has shaken the band to its core and, understandably, Carrier isn’t always steady. But while it’s Dodos least immediate work, it lingers and resonates in ways that give it a unique place in their discography, a promising path forward rather than what can initially be heard as a return to Time to Die’s soft-focus indie pop.
The most noticeable superficial difference on Carrier is that Long has switched almost entirely to playing electric guitar. Surprising, but not sacrilege-- though Dodos broke out on Visiter as an acoustic-and-drums duo and returned to that format on No Color, they’re not wedded to that setup, having incorporated electric guitars in a live setting and even a full-time vibraphonist on Time to Die. The strange thing is that they might be the first band to ever plug in for the sole purpose of rocking less. On prior singles such as “Fools”, “Fables”, and “Black Night”, Long played his acoustic with force and resourcefulness, utilizing the resonance in alternate tunings, inverted chords and string buzz and sending the signal through looping and distortion pedals. He’s not as focused on multiplicity here, neatly lacing together pinging, high notes rather than chords or riffs. You can sense a tentativeness in the shift towards a gentler minimalism-- both the first song (“Transformer”) and the first single (“Confidence”) begin as calm and quiet meditations, Long singing in a hushed, lower range over sprightly fingerpicking before giving way to the kind of percussive jams that we’ve come to expect. But those sections end up feeling mismatched and you sense that while Dodos were ready to do away with their old habits, they couldn’t quite figure out how to replace them.
Wedged in between those songs are rewarding mergers of their new approach with their old skills. The crisp production and autumnal glow of Carrier is a world away from Women’s meat-locker severity, though Reimer’s stylistic tics as a guitarist manifests in tangible ways. There’s a dissonant, deconstructive edge to the gnarled riff and fractious rhythms driving “Substance”, and the momentum makes for a seamless transition towards the tumbling chorus and a surprising brass section. “Stranger” similarly aligns Long’s tuneful folk-pop harmonies with tensile post-punk arrangements, as silvery palm-muted loops, pitch-shifted guitars and Kroeber’s unorthodox percussive clatter encase the delicate melodic core in steely armor.
The instrumental pyrotechnics of “Stranger” are a rare pleasure here and the combustion can be missed, as the energy exerted by Long and Kroeber as instrumentalists often was the hook on past records, rather than a certain melody or lyric. It’s an understandable loss, as the songwriting process has been completely inverted. Whereas previous records evolved out of instrumental jams, the lyrics on Carrier came first. But much like the six-string switch-up, it has the exact opposite effect of you might expect. Long hasn’t become a wordier or more poetic lyricist, in fact, Carrier is Dodos’ most plainspoken album. There seems to be a “first thought, best thought” approach as he asks cosmic, open-ended questions that strike to the heart of the human experience or sensible, legible fragments that can fleshed out over equally inquisitive music.
“What does a song hold?/ Was it love?,” Long asks to open the record and there’s no impatience or pedantry in it. Carrier instead has a quiet fortitude, searching for “substance, out of reach,” to use a phrase that pops up on two separate songs. To get there, Long occasionally reaches into the past, as on the station wagon reminiscence “Family”. More often, he’s just trying to be a better actor in the present. He’s a concerned father at the beginning of the heart-welling "Relief", and a consolate husband at the end-- "So I sit with my wife/ thinking of nothing much when we fight/ and I squeeze till we dry." Carrier’s final stretch gets a bit too wispy, but not before the suitably titled “The Current” delivers the lyric that feels like the record’s valedictory address: “If this love comes unto me/ I’m with it.”
So despite the role Reimer’s passing played in the creation of Carrier, it’s not Dodos’ answer to Tonight’s the Night-- it never feels haunted or wracked with morbid reflection, even the supposedly blunt “Death” is imbued with a sense of gratitude, seeing the natural order of things. Though Long claimed “we put our backs into this one” in an email to fans, it doesn't convey that force and struggle on the listener, subtly getting under your skin by pairing Dodos' slightest music with their heaviest emotions. A key lyric here is from “Substance”, where Long shouts “you will forget and I will remember,” and summarizes the wistful effect of Carrier when faced with the passage of time and the fragility of memory*--* it’s the kind of record for the times when you’re lost in thought about someone you might’ve known for a little while, wondering where they are and if they ever think about you.
