If you're putting together a rootsy indie folk band, I can understand choosing a name that involves animals. It makes you sound pantheistic and totally in tune with nature, yet also more primal and badass than if you'd just invoked trees or rivers or something. So-- Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses, Grizzly Bear, Department of Eagles-- I get it. But the Moondoggies? Really? Doesn't this name sound like it'd belong to a group of genial, balding, middle-aged dudes singing jokey songs about life on the prairie? Something not too far removed from the Gourds maybe?
Nope, the Moondoggies actually have far more in common with those aforementioned, better-named bands, making a manful, harmony-heavy brand of Americana rock modeled after fragile but forceful legends Neil Young, the Band, and the Grateful Dead. Tidelands, by contrast, finds the Moondoggies (and particularly lead singer Kevin Murphy) admirably striving to find their own voice, yet it's frequently a more crabbed and deliberate album than its predecessor. In other words, a quintessential example of artistic growing pains.
The Moondoggies, like indie-folk leading lights Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear, draw great strength from their vocal harmonies. In the Moondoggies' case, these harmonies frequently take on a gospel tinge, and they're intrinsic to the success of all of Tidelands' best songs. But unlike those freak-folk-friendly acts, these guys don't really isolate their harmonies or deploy them in unexpected places, instead tying them down pretty firmly to trad-rock strictures.
That's not to say this strategy can't be effective-- for proof, look no further than the churning, prophetic title track, the Music From Big Pink doppelgänger "What Took So [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| Long", or the violin-sweetened "Lead Me On". Still, it's a fine line the Moondoggies are walking, between something familiar but stirring and something utterly pedestrian, and they start straying across the bad side of the divide with frequency during the back half of the album. "Down the Well" and "Can't Be in the Middle" kick up a fair ruckus, but absent sufficient harmonic sweetening they end up sounding like the Drive-By Truckers with weaker drums and considerably worse lyrics. And at least the brooding guitars and boiling organs of those two cuts keep the words from commanding too much attention. No such luck on disappointing acoustic spotlights "Empress of the North" and "We Can't All Be Blessed", the latter of which finds Murphy awkwardly trying to shoehorn too many unnecessary syllables into nearly every one of his lines. Those kinds of issues are harder to overcome than the Moondoggies' unfortunate moniker.
