amber hollingsworth

You know when you’re on a date, and it’s totally average, and he’s asking all the standard questions, and he orders the chicken and you’re like, “Of course,” and then right as you’re about to give up hope of experiencing goosebumps he tells you he makes life-size dinosaurs out of Legos and buries them out in the desert for fun?

Seeing the Dodos perform at the El Rey was exactly like being on that date. For the first half of the concert, we might as well have just put on their album and stood facing forward in a large room together. Meric Long (vocals, guitar), Logan Kroeber (drums), and Keaton Snyder (vibraphone) are such impressively precise players, that even when Long’s guitar string broke, it seemed rehearsed. And then, about five songs into a rather mechanical live show, they surprised us with a burst of energy and actual concert versions of “In The Fire” and “Jodi.”

When all the lights went down we knew we were in for a treat. And really, is anyone ever disappointed by LEDs? Long attached single red, green, and blue lights to his hypnotically fast fingers, Kroeber to his drumsticks, and Snyder to his mallets, and the crowd watched music for a song.

For the rest of the show, the strict percussion and intricate finger picking only made the live performance more thrilling. Long pushed his sweaty bangs out of his eyes, and the Dodos were no longer music-producing machines, they were just extremely talented humans—talented enough to give you goosebumps. They finished off with a jaunty “Red and Purple” as requested by fans, and we all walked back to our cars with silly smiles on our faces.

—Amber Hollingsworth