After a week's worth of posts on my new-to-me albums of the last three months, I still feel a need to pipe up about one more album that doesn't fall in that category. In my 2008 wrap-up, I placed Dr. Dog's Fate at #5 on my best-of-the-year list. Here's what I said at the time:
[Fate is] such a rock record, so straightforward, so classic, so Beatlesy, so Bandy, so easily digestible indie-y. But six months since buying it, Fate has continued to grow on me. I originally thought it had two or three really fantastic songs and the rest good but not great. I'd go a month without listening to it, then I'd put it on again. I'd reconsider: like, four or five really fantastic songs and the rest good but not great. By now I'm up to about nine or ten really fantastic songs and the other three pretty good. By March this ought to be a masterpiece.
Honestly, I was being cheeky with that last line. But you know what? I think it happened. Listening to Fate has only become more enjoyable. If I were to remake my list today, I'd bump this up to #2, possibly even #1—it already feels like it's going to have more longevity than Fleet Foxes, an album I still love and will continue to defend against the haterz but which I admittedly haven't put on much since last year. Fate, on the other hand, continues to grow in my esteem. The five guys that make up this band are all confident, talented musicians—they have chops and they aren't afraid to put them to use. Co-leaders Scott McKicken and Toby Leaman essentially trade songs back and forth like a conversation, each track a meditation on religion, meaning, fate, will. The result is, while not exactly a concept album, a thematically linked record that moves from a song full of questions (opener "The Breeze") to songs of searching, desperation, and joy, and concluding with the hopeful "My Friend," which literally melts everything that came before it into a single song—as if to say it's all important, the questions and the searching, the desperation and the joy.
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Dr. Sog: The Breeze
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