San Francisco’s the Dodos originated as a one-man-band project (called Dodobird) by singer/guitarist Meric Long, who augmented his acoustic, country-blues guitar picking with loops and ambient keyboards and recorded a solo EP, 2005’s Dodo Bird. But he became intrigued with the idea of adding drums to the mix — or, more specifically, West African Ewe drumming. Curiously, he found exactly what he was looking for in the form of prog-metal drummer Logan Kroeber. Dodobird thus became the Dodos, and the newly formed duo debuted with 2006’s Beware of the Maniacs and followed it with last year’s much-lauded Visiter. Among the rave reviews for the record was Entertainment Weekly’s, which called Visiter “cerebral twisted folk that’s as wistful as it is strident.”