 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
22 July 08: Day of the Dog
 Buy this album. Do it for your ears. Do it for the band. Do it for your city. Fate is out today, and . . . wow. In less than a year, I went from ambivalent "well, they're cool cos they're from Philly" straight to number one groupie. Before I got Dr Dog, I'd seen them a couple times . . . with Buried Beds and Adam Arcuragi at the North Star, opening for Of Montreal at the FU Church . . . I had a ticket to their show at the TLA with My Morning Jacket and M Ward, which in hindsight was one hell of a bill, but for one reason or another didn't bother to go. I had Easy Beat and liked it well enough, but not enough for constant rotation. We All Belong warmed me up a little to the Dog, but in an acquired taste manner, like Tom Waits, or scotch. Acquire it I did, perhaps not coincidentally around the time I gave into my buddy Doug's insistence that I take down my Beach Boys barriers and just listen to Pet Sounds long enough until I liked it. Next thing I knew, I had "Worst Trip" stuck on loop in my head. ("Hey," I thought, "isn't that a phrase from 'Sloop John B'???") That's the thing with Dr Dog: every music review ever written about them mentions either the Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Band or all three. It seems that every single type of music that can be made has been made. What else is left beyond hip hop and electronic music? Maybe there's something that hasn't been invented yet, but even then it will, at least in some part, be derivative of something that already exists. So who's to blame Dr Dog that it's so obvious they are fans of those legendary B-bands. What matters is their own craft -- which just gets better and better each time out. Fate has been streaming on Phawker Radio for a few weeks, and a number of tracks have popped up on Dr Dog's Myspace and web sites like Stereogum here and there for the past couple months, but today, it's officially available for our consumption. Like each of the three B-bands, Dr Dog have always had multiple vocalists, with varying ranges of talent in the academic sense, but all of which simply wail. It's the wailing from bassist Toby Leaman that makes their taste so challenging to acquire. The dude screams -- especially on Fate -- there's no doubt about it. But, he nails it. While Scott McMicken's softer voice is perhaps less offensive, it's pretty easy to interpret Jeff Tweedy's comments last year in the New York Times (a year ago today, turns out) as being about the Toby Songs: They sing out, they sing with gusto, which isn't something that I hear a lot these days, especially in younger bands. They sound like real singers, people that really love to sing, as opposed to people that you kind of wonder why they're singing.But even as the Scott Songs are undeniably Catchy (go ahead -- listen to the choruses of "The Old Days" or "Uncovering the Old" two times in a row and see if they don't get stuck in your head all day . . . it can't be done), the Toby Songs are equally as Catchy, given enough spins. The whole damn album is Catchy. Catchy Catchy Catchy. That's the cliché of the day, but like any good cliché it has a real starting point. The transition from "The Rabbit, The Bat and The Reindeer" into clap-clap-clap intro of "100 Years" that continues throughout the song??? So calculated, so good. Fate is a real album with real continuity, but whose songs don't depend on each other so much they can't stand alone. They do.  Oh no. All right. Come on! In May at JB's. If Dr Dog one day earns a spot on the Philly Walk of Fame (more on this in the near future), I think it's a safe bet that it will be decided by Fate. Oh wait, did you see that? Decided by Fate? Of course you did. Dr Dog knows what they're doing . . . when they're being so brash as to name their album Fate; when they close the album with a train taking off (well, OK, the train that closes Pet Sounds is more in the distance, behind the barking dog); when song after song deals with death and God. Man, I can't get enough. They've already got a huge following (they released their set from the 2007 Bonnaroo), and with a tour that's taking them from now to Thanksgiving and from Philly to Amsterdam by way of San Francisco and Conan O'Brien (which you may have seen last week on Philebrity -- check out Zach Miller banging out those keys on the TV), that following should get huger. It's Fate. * * * Dr Dog's label, Park the Van, has an array of options for purchasing the new album. Check it HERE. And to celebrate the new album, the band's official site has a cool interactive Flash thingy HERE. –B Love |
