Dr. Dog

Dr. Dog’s third studio album on Anti, B Room, marks the band’s greatest point of clarity in more than a decade of performing and recording. Their arrangements, while still ambitious, are much simpler, moving past the multi-tracked pastiche of earlier efforts into a unique and vibrant band voice. Indeed, it is this discovery of the band-collective as a compositional tool that makes B Room the most cohesive, soulful, loose, and plain fun record of their career. The making of B Room begins, not with the sound of guitars and drums, but with jackhammers. When Dr. Dog reconvened this winter to record, they didn’t have demos, they even didn’t have a place to make them. What they had was the foresight to know that the recording process needed to be remodeled. After ending their lease at Meth Beach, where they had been headquartered for the past eight years,the band took on the commitment of constructing an entirely new recording space within a now defunct silversmith mill. As bassist-vocalist Toby Leaman put it, “The whole process of recording really started with building the studio.” Rather than just cosmetically altering the appearance to make it feel like their own as ... more...