Fat Dog, WOOF. (2024)
Release Date: September 6, 2024
Label: Domino
Length: 33:03
Produced By: James Ford, Jimmy Robertson, Joe Love
Rating: 6.1
Review by: Alexander Hellene
Highlights: “Closer to God,” “King of the Slugs,” “Running”
“We are all just dogs gnashing our teeth at the moon,” intones English actor Neil Bell, unofficial hype man for Fat Dog, the UK’s latest post-punk wunderkinds, ending his misanthropic speech before opener “Vigilante” kicks in, a well-done punky/EDM groove, all throbbing drums, grinding bass, and fuzzy synths while vocalist Joe Love intones a tale of fighting crime with household objects in a flat drawl that sometimes erupts into a satisfying, distortion-caked scream; you can almost hear the sizzling peaks in the soundwave. And then is that . . . klezmer?1 Eastern-tinged melodies, the hint of ancient deserts, float over the industrial-strength chaos like a mysterious wind.
But what are they trying to do? What are they trying to say? Fat Dog are weird, no doubt. Fat Dog throws disparate elements together and creates something new. But ultimately, WOOF. is unsatisfying, caught between trying to be tongue-in-cheek and playing it straight.
Born of COVID-19 lockdown-induced boredom and a desire to have fun,2 Fat Dog secured a record deal before releasing a note of recorded music, based purely on the strength of their live shows, which do look like fun. Thanks to Fat Dog, rock is not dead, headlines assure us, but listening to WOOF., two questions come to mind:
Are we sure? and
Is Fat Dog even rock?
Genre ultimately doesn’t matter, but rock savior Fat Dog is not. I’m not sure WOOF. is the best representation of who Fat Dog is based on interviews with the band, which makes it seem like they really don’t want to be taken too seriously. But by failing to fully commit to either bit, WOOF. remains stuck in the middle, which is a shame because there are some good ideas on here.
Unlike other dance-oriented bands like Electric Six, or other groups who are also in on the joke like The Darkness, whose frontmen display an effortlessly winking, swaggering machismo, on WOOF. it’s difficult to tell whether Love and crew—keyboardist Chris Hughes, keyboardist/saxophonist Morgan Wallace, bassist Ben Harris,3 and drummer Johnny “Doghead” Hutchinson—are going for menace or kitsch. Much has been made of Fat Dog’s genre mashups—with the penchant for klezmer and saxophonist Wallace, the comparisons to Mr. Bungle are inevitable—but whereas Mr. Bungle made blending world music with techno, metal, and pop seem effortless and fluid on tracks like “Desert Search for Techno Allah,” “Ars Moriendi,” and “Goodbye Sober Day,” Fat Dog’s attempts sound forced, with songwriting suited to the club floor and not serious listening.
This is dance punk, okay? EDM with live drums, and hats of to Hutch for not being too metronomic. But given the klezmer conceit, or gimmick if you want to be uncharitable, every song starts to sound a bit the same. The gimmick is required in each song, and therefore each song does little to differentiate itself from the rest. There are lots of Phrygian and harmonic minor riffs, lots of half-step chord progressions, and other musical devices associated with Eastern music.
The band's first single, the seven-minute “King of the Slugs,” is a prime example of WOOF.’s potential and the failure to live up to it. “King of the Slugs” starts with a club-worthy bass and drum groove soon joined by a gloss of synths and woodwinds, again invoking that desert spirit—a surprisingly effective mix if a bit facile. A few minutes in, the the song takes a turn with a dramatic breakdown giving way to a quieter, halftime groove in 6/8, with slapback reverb on the handclaps, i.e., a folk-music interlude.4 When Love works himself into a frenzy singing “Through the walls, through the walls,” ad infinitum, his bandmates wind up into a frenzy until more dramatics close the song out. It’s the most musically interesting song, on the album, but it’s disjointed, and while I appreciate the shifts in tone, tempo, and time, “King of the Slugs” is ultimately disjointed, with no artfulness to the transitions, like turbulence on a flight going nowhere. Are people really supposed to dance to this?
And so goes WOOF. If all of this is supposed to be funny, why does the band play it so seriously?.
The incessant 7/8 groove of “Closer to God,” the I-bII-bIII-bII5 chord progression sounding like an old Greek folk song pummels your ears thanks to Harris’s excellent bass tone, and the bouncy, upbeat-heavy “Wither” are catchy and will make you bob your head, but where’s the catharsis? Where’s the payoff? Fat Dog do this thing where a song will build and build but, right before the release, they pause for a few bars of ambient synths or sound effects—and look, I’m a fan of musique concrète being incorporated into rock and pop, and “Wither” cleverly features a beeping heart monitor that eventually flatlines—before getting to the point, which is fine once or twice, but Fat Dog do this throughout.
The best-written song, “All the Same,” features a pulsating groove straight out of the Nine Inch Nails playbook and a cool hitch in the beat, with Hughes’s keyboard stabs and Wallace’s winds adding drama but feeling pro forma, as though the klezmer thing is there because it has to be, though the secondary melody is interesting and unexpected.
When the band slows down, the respite is welcome, though emotional resonance is elusive because songs like “Clowns,” which costs Love’s voice in autotune, making him sound like a robot crooning over moody, ambient synths and piano, sound too earnest for the humor in ridiculous lyrics like “Crackheads to the left/And clowns to the/right I’m falling down the stairs/No jiggy for me tonight” to land. “I Am the King” suffers the same fate—over a royal road chord progression (I-IV-iii-vi) that shoots for the elegiac, Love, again autotuned beyond recognition, repeats the song’s title, eventually proclaiming he’s crying not for the you addressed in the song, but because he “just watched Karate Kid 2.” The accompanying video is more entertaining than the song itself, which comes across like a placeholder.
The last real song proper on WOOF. (closer “And So it Came to Pass” is a sub-one minute spoken-word outro courtesy once again of Mr. Bell), “Running” is very similar in rhythmic feel to “Closer to God,” and provides the album’s only true lyrical intrigue:
I said wake me up, wake me up
When the shooting starts
I’m gonna pack my bag for the hill
Watch it from afar
Further references to a “bad, bad puta madre” bring to mind the pregnant violence in a dry and dusty town in the American west just waiting for a shootout to begin; here the klezmer elements work well, from one desert to another, winding its way to a satisfying ending with the band finally showing some nimbleness beyond the rigid strictures of dance music. Would that Fat Dog’s disparate musical elements came together this well on the reset of the album.
I think WOOF. would work better in a crowded club while chemically enhanced, the songs remixed and extended by about ten-minutes. Divorced from this setting and judged as a piece of music you sit down and listen to, the truth is WOOF. is empty calories; I appreciate EDM written with rock sensibilities, but there’s a reason most dance music doesn’t follow this structure—it’s repetitive in a way that it needs to be for its intended purpose, which is different than the purpose of a rock or pop song. Maybe Fat Dog will hit its stride after a few more albums. It’s too bad, because on paper, punky EDM klezmer sounds right up my alley. Ah well, there’s always Mr. Bungle.
WOOF.
Vigilante
Closer to God
Wither
Clowns
King of the Slugs
All the Same
I Am the King
Running
And So it Came to Pass
Love cites both Klezmer and the music to the video game Serious Sam as influences.
Quoth Love:
The music has to be good, but it doesn’t have to be really, really good. You just don’t want to be a shoegaze band, you want to have fun. If we’re having fun, then everyone else might too.
Harris played on the album but summarily exited the band, being replaced by Jacqui Wheeler.
I refuse to believe Fat Dog is not influenced by Mr. Bungle.
So Phrygian it hurts!