With its emphasis on slacker attitude and anything-goes energy over ambition and technical polish, indie rock is the consummate entry-level genre. It's the musical equivalent of a pick-up-and-play Wii game compared to, say, techno's steeply learning-curved Xbox 360 shooter. As such, musicians who began their careers as catch-all indie rockers before narrowing their focus to more technically and conceptually challenging genres are a dime a dozen.
Fog's Andrew Broder is much rarer: His trajectory inverts the familiar one. Fog's first two LPs were released on Ninja Tune, but they were steeped in the Anticon aesthetic (fittingly, Doseone brought Fog to Ninja Tune's attention)-- an obscure haze of post-Prince-Paul sample wizardry ballasted with baubles of melody and avant-hop guest stars, generously laced with rhythmic decomposition and seething negative space. The delicate Ether Teeth gave us Fog at its most challenging and rewarding-- it was an uncompromising attempt to build music that towered, teetered, but didn't move.
For listeners bored by artful stasis, the relatively straightforward electro-pop of 2005's 10th Avenue Freakout (which featured discernible structures and more of Broder's vocals than ever before) must've seemed like a step in the right direction. But for those who admired the imperfect yet promising Ether Teeth, it was the first step in a regression that culminates in the unabashed indie-rock of Ditherer. There's nothing wrong with the urge to try on more traditional garb, but while Broder is an adequate frontman, it's not his best look, and Ditherer makes the previously outré musician sound mundane. He's in the habit of mercilessly stretching his syllables over the tricked-out riffs, which is a good cheat to make awkward lines fit into consistent structures, but quickly becomes monotonous. And in this context, his ridiculous lyrics have more in common with the dopey pretensions of Primus than Bob Pollard's absurdist Zen.
For Ditherer, Broder coalesced Fog into a rock trio featuring himself on guitar and vocals, Mark Erickson on bass, and Tim Glenn on drums. As if making up for lost time, the album finds Fog stitching together a hodgepodge of rock styles into a quilt of clashing colors. "We Will Have Vanished" is ponderous, enervating stoner rock. "Inflatable Ape Pt. 3" is indebted to Pavement, with its stabby guitars and nervous drums. The roots-rock-gone-wild of "I Have Been Wronged" tangles up a percolating guitar figure with forlorn hound-dog vocals, zippy prog trills, and a lounge-y breakdown. "Hallelujah Daddy" is off-kilter Southern rock, and the spacious, eerie "What Gives?" (which features Microphones' Phil Elvrum on backing vocals) reminds us that it's hard to understate how crucial Thom Yorke's otherworldly voice is to Radiohead's success.
Broder is better at details than broad strokes, and Ditherer contains some excellent ones; they're just buried in the piecemeal and decidedly indelicate songwriting. "Hallelujah Daddy", which features a guest appearance from Why?, comes to life in its gospel-rock middle section. The dubby title track (dubby is good for Broder; it plays into his strengths) profits greatly from Dosh's sprightly electro embellishments and Andrew Bird's weepy violin, while "What's Up Freaks?" offers a welcome respite from Broder's voice with a guest spot by Low's Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk. It's easy to admire the careful studio touches that pop up in almost every song-- the helium-deflating breakdown of "We Will Have Vanished", the telegraphic percussive blips and vocal strobes of "You Did What You Thought", and the bending sheet-metal on post-rock epic "On the Gallows". But it's hard to enjoy them without bogging down in been-there, done-that songwriting.
