The more Dr. Dog changes, the more they stay the same. B-Room is a familiar addendum to their repertoire. Add a dash of soulful spice, salt with a little R&B, and you've got this new line-up of songs. After deciding the old recording boundaries wouldn't cut it, the gang picked up a set of hammer and nails, channeled their inner carpenters, and went to work and built a studio, the eponymous B-Room. Working and living in Philadelphia, they harnessed their subconscious and impulsive creative urges in the studio, a more free-flowing approach than pre-structured time periods.
B-Room runs stripped of Dr. Dog's previous over-dubbed, verging on psychedelic techniques, and approaches a mixture of ballad, gospel, and blues. "Truth" and "Broken Heart" kick off the album's vibe with redemptive phrases of freedom and cries for rain. "Distant Light" speaks similarly. The lyrics depict a person who meets a man while traveling down a road. The man tells him, "you could travel on forever, but you'll never be back here." "Follow the distant light" is repeated multiple times in Scott McMicken's usual aching vocal style.
Lyrics are the strong-suit in Dr. Dog's new work. "Too Weak to Ramble," one of the highlights of the album, is a classic ballad, telling the story from a "ramblers" first-person perspective. Lines such as "I wandered blindly into that road" and ""while others have secrets, I have none" sung over gentle and lightly-strummed guitar chords, hit a poignant apex. "Rock N' Roll" is a freestyle, loose rhythm that discusses the narrator's initial encounter with the ground-breaking music: "This one time when I was young, he gave me a tape, it freaked me out." This track is appropriately placed to introduce "Love," a groovy rock track that hollers back to their initial slightly-psychedelic sound.
Even though all of the tracks on B-Room are on the whole, decent, none of them are striking. Kind of like a mouthful of crackers, a taste that is both bland and familiar. Fans of previous Dr. Dog albums will find they haven't deviated, but haven't reached a new breakthrough either, and perhaps, that's not the point of B-Room.
Grade: B-
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