"I don't ever want to go back to the old days," sings Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken on "My Old Ways", a song off 2007's We All Belong. They're kind of ironic lyrics coming from a band that keeps scraping the bottom of a barrel of older influences—the Beach Boys, the Band, the Faces, the Dead, CSNY for good measure, Captain Beefheart in interviews. And yet, it's a fitting personal statement considering Carl Wilson's recent evaluation of another critically panned, fan-beloved outfit: Mumford & Sons. Quoting Chuck Eddy, Wilson wrote, "The Mumfords barely skim the surface. They don't seem remotely musically curious." The same can be said of Dr. Dog, which has rarely made music with any real sense of urgency or ambition, much less curiosity about their predecessors. (In related news, Dr. Dog is currently touring with the Lumineers.)
To their credit, Dr. Dog did attempt an overhaul for their seventh full-length, B-Room. The band started from the ground up, building a new studio and living quarters in an abandoned silversmith factory in their hometown of Philadelphia. They recorded B-Room in the studio space they named it after, for the first time taking advantage of their strengths as performers and tracking everything live. The difference is subtle at best, but their decision not to complicate things with overdubs contributed to the refreshing straightforwardness of a few songs, including their sparest yet, "Too Weak to Ramble". Over an acoustic guitar, co-vocalist Toby Leaman sings so ragged you can practically hear the walls of the B-room, and his life, closing in around him. "Broken Heart" is another lesson in restraint, straying from its tight, chugging clip for only the most emphatic of Dr. Dog's signature jaw-popping harmonies.
But it's still hard for Dr. Dog to break out of their decade-plus mold. The closest anyone came was on 2010's Shame, Shame, arguably their strongest effort to date. Producer Rob Schnapf (Islands, Elliott Smith) and guest vocalist Jim James helped buff the band's motley mass appeal until it shone through the album's brassy builds and sing-along choruses, utilizing the energy of six musicians to the fullest. Without outside direction, however, Dr. Dog quickly go back to their old ways. Afrobeat specialists Antibalas provide the horns on B-Room, but their talents are wasted on songs like "Long Way Down", the beginning of which sounds like the Wayne's World dissolve tuned to a baritone sax. It shows some musical curiosity on Dr. Dog's part, for sure, but the track references Be the Void's heavy-handed experimentalism—which also finds a way into the twinkly, Theremin-laced ballad "Twilight"—more than anything else.
Around the time Be the Void came out, McMicken told the AV Club, "Why be influenced by Dr. Dog? Why not just be influenced by the Beatles?" Good question. There's nothing at all wrong with jamming and selling out shows and custom leather items, but if you don't believe your music adds anything to the conversation, it's fair to ask what the point is. Most music is by nature derivative, but that doesn't mean it has to be. Foxygen, for example, though much younger than Dr. Dog, manage to find ways to make the same decades-old pop and rock'n'roll new and exciting. Whether their music endures in the same way remains to be seen, but McMicken makes it sound like Dr. Dog has already given up on that possibility. And that's too bad, because it seems at one point they were as hungry as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: on "Rock & Roll," Leaman sings, "Who’da known/ That it would be rock and roll/ That would terrify and eat me/ That would haunt me so completely?" Indeed, who would have known.
