Los
Doggies | Onebody
Every so often you bump into a record that makes you double
check to be sure you’re still in the rustic folkie/singer-songwriter
bosom of the Hudson Valley—or that you’re even
still on planet Earth, for that matter. This, the debut by
New Paltz’s Los Doggies, a quartet led by singer-guitarists
and brothers Evan and Jesse Stormo, is definitely one of
them. The ambitious, quirky, and bizarrely funny Onebody
is something altogether other; an ungodly union of Frank
Zappa and Ween with the added twist of the brothers’ own
peculiar fraternal telepathy. Catch Los Doggies live and
the album’s title makes perfect sense, right from the
first tandem-lead guitar note; on stage, the brothers (hard
to tell if they’re twins or not) are a single, two-headed
entity, trading riffs and singing unison harmonies as they
eye and grin at each other in a demented and somewhat disturbing
manner. Makes one think of those creepy apparitions of the
twin girls in The Shining. Which is pretty cool, actually.
Onebody’s 12 tunes are all marked by intricate, many-sectioned
arrangements, indicating a rabid mania for prog rock on the
part of the Stormo siblings. But as complex and virtuosity-obsessed
as elongated pieces like “Two Abobos” are, the
band’s flair for catchy melodies is never far off as
it force-feeds the surreally humorous couplets to your brain. ’Tis
a weird world indeed in which you find yourself singing along
to lines such as “Caramel Bugnuts, together we salute
you” (from, yes, “Caramel Bugnuts”). But
sing you will.
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