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Sep 10, 2024 Issue #73 - Maya Hawke and Nilüfer Yanya By Scotty Dransfield

The so-called “UK post-punk scene,” centered around the label Speedy Wunderground and the storied venue The Windmill, continues to churn out strikingly original and energetic rock bands. This year’s crop includes the frenzied Brixton quintet Fat Dog, who make rousing electro-punk that almost always threatens to fly off the rails, and whose debut album seems designed specifically to make listeners foam at the mouth. WOOF. arrives fully-formed and ready to either soundtrack or catalyze an apocalypse.

Everything fits together: the band name, the album’s title, the cover image of a huge French bulldog lording over a city that’s crumbling toward the center of the earth. One can almost imagine the way the music sounds before pressing play, which is quite a feat for a band with such a novel sound; it’s huge and brash and wild, a release of all the pent-up energy and angst that’s circulated the world since at least the first pandemic years. Epic Justice-esque synth-rock collides with spit-flying art-punk à la black midi, with surprising shades of Eastern European folk influencing the occasional rhythms and melodies. Lead single “King of the Slugs” and its follow-up, “Running”—in the running for anthem of the year, by the way—feature all of the aforementioned qualities in spades. It’s impressive the way bandleader Joe Love and company can synthesize them so naturally.

That being said, listened to as an album, WOOF. really only has two modes: foaming at the mouth (five to six of the tracks can accurately be called bangers), and barking up a tree—which is to say, the non-bangers are all shorter interludes and outros that merely tide one over between the more complete songs. One gets the impression the album serves as a collection of invitations to see Fat Dog live—all accounts out of SXSW earlier this year were raves. Whatever the case, WOOF. is a debut that serves its main purposes, establishing Fat Dog as a band to watch and making some music for folks to lose their minds to. (www.fatdogfatdogfatdog.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10