The Dodos – Individ

★★★★

The Dodos broke through in 2007 with Visiter, an enthralling album of new sounds that played with rhythm like they were just discovering it for the first time.  Since then they’ve spent years chasing their own tail, exploring their penchant for tom-heavy polyrhythms, room-filling vocals, and poetic lyrics.  Individ is the first album since that breakthrough that really stands out from the others, and although it doesn’t do anything extrememly different musically, it feels like there is more raw energy on these tracks.  Evidence of this can be found especially on the back half of the album, where the last four songs launch out into blissfully distorted space that culminates on the guitar-storm of “Pattern/Shadow”.  The idea on this one is resilience; “Precipitation” calls on a storm and survives in the face of it, setting a course for the rest of the album.  This theme fits in well with their previous album, 2013’s Carrier, which found the band needing to move on in the face of the recent death of short-term guitarist Christopher Reimer.  Here’s hoping that it’s evidence of a career resurgence for the band, as they deserve to become more well-known.