Pitchfork

By this point in Dr. Dog's career, one can only assume that 1960s pop is so deeply embedded in the neural connectors of their collective brain that it's unwittingly marred the band's seven-year career. The group's latest record, We All Belong, is another collection of impressionistic déjà-vus-- easy guitar melodies and predictable rhythms thrust at us with no discernible amount of self-awareness.

Dr. Dog are due applause for putting on a good live show, where they showcase their throwback sound with flair, but that energy and charm doesn't frequently translate to their recorded content. The title track goes so far as to sound like a discarded Beatles track, complete with George Harrison's crackly, jarring guitar, Ringo Starr's dramatic, ear-boxing drums, distant ooh-wah vocal harmonies, and a Paul McCartney whine of a chorus. Except would the Beatles ever bring us a lyric as odious as "We all belong"? (With "All You Need Is Love" they came close.)

Elsewhere, "My Old Ways", fun track that it is, flits between the trebly vocals of the Shout Out Louds to the simple piano dalliances of Menomena's first album, but without either's more addictive qualities. Playful harmonies in the song's final minutes are subtly jarring and a departure from the strong, leaden, and pretty polyphonies of the Fab Four. "The Way the Lazy Do" affords us more of the messy, buzzing electric guitars popular in contemporary indie rock: the climbing, sadly triumphant chorus tricks us into thinking the melody will resolve, but the screeching keyboards keep it languorous and jarring until the close.

The tiny, joyous blues throwback "Die, Die, Die" captures our attention with a hyperbolic narrative about smoking, and here the vocals take on the humanistic, nakedly emotional delivery of a singer like Man Man's Honus Honus. "Alaska" is another more successful turn, as twinkling yet robust guitars mimic howling, porous, unintelligible vocals. If the influences are too glaring and the melodies too circuitous, Dr. Dog at least manages to sandwich heartfelt messages between their fleeting moments of originality, like the neat chaos of whistles and percussion in the dying minutes of "Weekend" and the surprisingly powerful rhythmic switch at the end of "Ain't It Strange". Hold it by its edges and the experience of this album suffers–– the rocky center is where we find personal truths writ well.