Review: Dr. Dog @ 9:30 Club

The band’s latest and fifth full-length, Fate, is a perfect melding of Dr. Dog’s many influences – a more cohesive record than We All Belong — though the latter may have better individual songs. And on this night – island motif and all — Dr. Dog drew heavily from both, preferring to highlight Fate’s summer vibe over the 2007 disc and the band’s older material.

Opener The Old Days set the tone right from the start, with guitarist Scott McMicken and bassist Toby Leaman franticly running around the stage and jumping up and down as McMicken sang “Down, down, down/ Moon gonna fall down/ Thump, thump, thump/ House gonna fall down/ Chop, chop, chop/ Tree gonna fall down/ Down, down, down/ Down to the bottom” over a reggae beat – fitting the stage’s island theme.

Fate’s de-facto title track, The Beach, (the album takes its title from the song’s chorus), sounded great live, with the band really cranking out the rock and the energy, again displaying great stage presence.

And the band really needed the energy and enthusiasm on this night as something was wrong with Leaman’s voice. Perhaps he’s still suffering from the same issues that forced the band to cancel a few shows this summer, maybe it was just an off night, but he really strained on Army of Ancients and Alaska, sounding raspier and throatier than usual.

Luckily, Leaman splits vocal responsibilities with McMicken, but he sings some of the band’s best songs. Alaska just didn’t sound the same with Leaman’s sub-par vocal performance.

McMicken did his best to make up for it leading raucous renditions of Worst Trip, My Friend and the show-closing The Rabbit, The Bat, and The Reindeer. The latter showed Dr. Dog has moved far past its days as an anything goes psychedelic pop collective, operating fully as a well-oiled machine.

The only real sense of jamming on the night came during The Girl, which took on a much darker, almost prog-rock feel before shifting into a faster, punk-like reading.

Vocally, the band is built around its ornate harmonies and while they didn’t sound great at first on Hang On, by the end of the show the band’s three- and sometimes four-part harmonies sounded superb – Leaman’s vocal problems and all. Though, at times, McMicken’s guitar, which sounded louder than anything else coming out of the PA, drowned out the vocals and the other instruments.

One of the fun parts about listening to Dr. Dog is picking out the band’s many influences. To say Dr. Dog wears its influences on its sleeve would be an understatement. The Ark’s guitar and vocal harmonies are ripped straight from The Beatles (either Come Together or She’s So Heavy – take your pick), not to say it’s a bad thing. Alaska might as well be Dr. Dog’s The Band song and you can look to any of the band’s harmonies for strokes of The Beach Boys and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. On From, McMicken even sounded a bit like a higher-pitched Jeff Tweedy.

It’s not easy to get a late-night weekday crowd at 9:30 club moving (the show had a 10 p.m. door time and Dr. Dog had an 11:30 p.m. start), but Dr. Dog managed to get most of the about half-filled club moving by the end of the night. By the time the band launched into The Rabbit, The Bat, and The Reindeer, the song felt like a celebration more than anything else. And as the band’s last scheduled U.S. date of 2008 it was more than appropriate.