Shame, Shame was Dr. Dog's sixth LP, and their first with an outside producer. Though they'd hit the studio with frequent Elliott Smith collaborator Rob Schnapf with that oft-parroted aim of bringing their spirited live show to the recording booth, the outsider's presence helped the Philly rockers shave some of the shaggy excess from their earlier efforts, teasing out their bright, bouncy, McCartney-indebted melodies. Critics, largely resistant to Dr. Dog's retrograde charms, praised the disc; our own Zach Kelly rightly noted that its "bigger, more charismatic sound" felt like "the work of a younger, wide-eyed outfit."
Be the Void arrives without the guiding hand of Schnapf, or anybody really; opting, as before, to go it alone, on its seventh LP, the band returns to the sunburnt sprawl of its first few records. You've got your big, bulbous melodies, your rattly unplugged strums, your mile-long solos; in vocalists Scott McMicken and Toby Leaman, you've got yourself a veritable two-man harmony factory stocked with enough whisky and cigarettes to get you through the spring. All this-- and what seems to be a fairly encyclopedic history of popular American rock music from, oh, 1968 through 1974-- are pretty much the same cards they've been shuffling since the start, but as Schnapf's work on Shame proved, they fare best when they're a little uncomfortable, when somebody's there to tell them no. Its melodies are, as ever, sturdy, its production warm and homespun. But too often, Be the Void finds Dr. Dog unleashed, letting their wilder ideas get the better of them.
Take "Warrior Man", a supposed practice-room pisstake now taking up space on a Dr. Dog record. Caught out somewhere between Black Sabbath, Styx's "Mr. Roboto", and Paul Revere and the the Raiders' "Indian Reservation", the song depicts some kind of interstellar junkyard Al Gore-type rattling around the dump for a longer-than-it-feels five minutes. It's not a bad little stomp they get going underneath the stoned sci-fi, but it's not enough to salvage this particular heap from its own silliness. Surely an outside presence would've told them to let the dopily one-note "Warrior Man" stay, at most, a B-side. Then there's "That Old Black Hole", a sort of sub-Paul Simon cliche-flipper ("there are eggshells on the floor; therefore, I never touch the ground," which, y'know, just makes good sense) too impressed with its own supposed cleverness to ever make a lick of sense. They've never been ace lyricists, but I do miss the neighborly, come-grab-a-beer vibe of their We All Belong era; here, they seem to be going for some kind of vagueness-as-profundity business that rarely gets its point across. "Let's just clear the air," McMicken sings on "Over Here, Over There", before adding "I am over here, I'm over there." This clears nothing, McMicken!
The melodic zig-zag and sly groove of "Heavy Light", the buzzing National steel beneath gospel-twang closer "Turning the Century", the room sound, and the warmth generated by McMicken and Leaman's voices as they come together in (yet another) harmony are all reasons to recommend Be the Void. But, for every moment of clarity, a rose-colored note of reverence for the past wafts in and threatens to blot out some of Void's would-be bright spots. Though the jaunty "Over There" nicks the verse melody from Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good" wholesale, by and large, any outright theft's been a bit better concealed. "Big Girl" is generically Stonesy, right down to the slight whiff of misogyny; "Get Away", meanwhile, locates the Seals & Crofts at the heart of Fleet Foxes. And the rust-colored, harmony-doused, Beatles-meets-Band stuff's in full evidence here as well; creaky opener "Lonesome", a kind of Scarlett-style postscript to Hank Williams' immortal "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (not, sadly, written from the whippoorwills' perspective), could've easily tumbled off of the back half of Cahoots. At the risk of getting all Retromania on you, it's no crime in and of itself that Dr. Dog borrow liberally from the past; their trouble lies in what they do with the stuff. The answer, seven albums in? A resounding "let it be."
