It’s tough to shake a nickname. Meric Long and Logan Kroeber began a tour with Austin band Peter and the Wolf under the name Dodo Bird, but by the tour’s end, the duo had a new title. Red Hunter, Peter and the Wolf’s founder, “kept referring to us to our faces as ‘The Dodos,’” Long says. Hunter’s teasing pet name for the band stuck, and the high-intensity guitar-and-drum team became The Dodos.

 

But before there were The Dodos, and even before Dodo Bird, there was Long, a solo musician living in San Francisco. Long, 29, still lives in San Francisco and grew up only 40 minutes from the city in Concord, Calif. His involvement in music began when “I was a little guy,” he says. He played piano first and then trombone, but “hated performing” until he started playing guitar. He played in bands in high school, one of which he and his friends modeled after Seattle,Wash., instrumental group Critters Buggin, with a saxophone player replacing a lead vocalist. Rehearsals for the band meant that Long and his friends would “get high after school and play in the woods,” he says.

Long followed his musical pursuits to college in Southern California. He never finished school, but he did stick around long enough to take some classes in ethnomusicology, which sparked his interest in non-Western music, including polyrhythmic West African Ewe drumming. Long moved to San Francisco after leaving school and started playing mellow acoustic guitar as a solo performer. Around this time, Long met Kroeber, his roommate’s cousin. Kroeber, a former member of a metal band, began accompanying Long at his shows and also contributed to Long’s first solo EP, Dodo Bird, released in 2005.

Kroeber and Long’s musical union resulted in a sound that blended folk guitar with driving drum rhythms that played off of the equally strong beats created by an attack-style guitar playing.

The duo went from playing under Long’s name, to performing as Dodo Bird before settling on The Dodos, a series of name changes that Long says, was “bad for marketing ourselves.”

Long and Kroeber released their debut LP, Beware of the Maniacs, as The Dodos in 2006 and began a tough two-year touring period that Long refers to as “the sad years.”They recorded their next album, Visiter, in 2007, the same year they were signed to Frenchkiss after label representatives caught the band playing at Mercury Lounge.The Dodos signed, not only because the people at Frenchkiss made a good impression, but also because the label was founded by Syd Butler of Les Savy Fav, a connection that Long says made him think, “‘Fuck, I want to be on that label.’” Frenchkiss released Visiter in 2008, followed up in 2009 with Time to Die, an album that Long says is “not meant to be as morose as it sounds.”The title comes from the expression “Fuck it.Time to die,” which Long says he commonly uses “whenever I’m about to do something embarrassing.” The Dodos intended to go in a different direction on Time to Die, polishing the sound and focusing more on melody and song structure, two areas on which Long says, the band is weak. He says that he also wanted to get away from the “desperate anxiety” of Visiter’s music, a description that does not fit with the easygoing nature of the musics’ creators.

Despite the emotive nature of the group’s music, Long and Kroeber have a sense of humor.When the group’s latest album leaked two months prior to its September release date, Long and Kroeber made a video response, directing listeners to a high-quality stream of the album and suggesting that the band would “get to the bottom” of the leak source. Long says fans now ask if the band has any leads on who leaked the album, but he swears the comment was meant as a joke. Funny that anyone would take a comment from a band called The Dodos too seriously.

> The Dodos

Oct. 13, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St. (betw. Wythe & Kent Aves.), Brooklyn, 718-486-5400; 8, $15. Also Oct. 14 at Bowery Ballroom.