The Dodos Dominate SXSW, Me, You

It's funny how the relative slumber of of the music release schedule during most Jan - March spans awakens post-SXSW. Maybe it's directly related to the festival, maybe it's the spring release blitz that's beginning to swarm around unsuspecting listeners like killer bees... but either way, the loudening and often deafening buzz that follows the once-a-year convergence in Austin, while sometimes a little hard to swallow, always manages to excite the hell out of me. A few of the spotlight artists who turned a lot of heads this year (despite the lack of well-known bands who usually grace the festival with their presence) were the lovely Lykke Li, dance-drone duo Fuck Buttons, and the most exciting of all, Dodos.

These boys have already been labeled by many as products of San Francisco's ever-growing "freak-folk" scene, but they sound nothing like those "freaks" we think of as leading the SF pack (Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart...even Donovan, maybe). "Psych-Folk" might be a more adequate genre (generally) but even that's a fragile glass box the Dodos unique style shatters. I'm about halfway through their upcoming sophomore album Visiter and it's one of the only so far this year that I can see myself listening to obsessively, deciphering every whisper of music the diverse fourteen tracks provide.

For the lack of a cohesive alternative that might provide a better, more complete (and therefore condensed and contained) four minute sampling of what the Dodos are "all" about, here's a pair of songs that give you just one slice of the Dodos' stylistic pie:

[MP3] The Dodos - Fools
[MP3] The Dodos - Red And Purple

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Check out the video for "Fools" at Forkcast, it'll give you a good idea of how much SXSW ass they kicked.

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