Dog Day, Photo by David CleplinskyAlso Make Great Pets
[16 June 2006]
Halifax's Dog Day effortlessly combines intensity and apathy, passivity and aggression. Does that make it the perfect punk band?
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by Sarah Feldman
My two favorite things about classic punk: its nuanced sense of irony and its emphasis on silence. I'm not even being sarcastic.
I mean, what other art form can so successfully catch a voice at exactly the moment when it's saying "I want to curl up in a hole and die" and turn that up so loud it becomes a source of power? Who says you need to spend ten years studying Eliot's "Four Quartets" or the Tao Te Ching to appreciate the weird intersection of meaning and emptiness felt in the things that matter most (or don't, of course)? All it takes is a few guys shouting about futility and impotence at the top of their lungs to the kind of driving, ineluctable beat that is pure, thumping life-force, and it's all there in your body: all the ambivalence and contradiction it took Old Possum a few dozen books to get down.
That's the silence too: what Susan Sontag called the "aesthetics of silence" applies equally to the wall of sound. Intensity carried along on waves of power chords and ear-grinding feedback both increases incomprehensibility and undercuts claims of meaninglessness. The best punk lyrics, as the truism goes, are the throwaway lines (Iggy's "guns all night / blah blah blah"; Rotten's "I gotta go under the wall / I don't understand this bit at all") not because this music is too dumb to have anything reasonable to say but because what it has to say is so bound up in its thrust and failure. Not nihilism -- or actually, yes, but the nihilism of the 16-year-old for whom everything matters too much to say or do anything about it, whose tantrums and convulsions and bad poetry are not an expression of any particular thought or feeling so much as a desire to be jerked free of the familiar pattern of action and thought and feeling into the unknown something-that-really-matters.
All of which really ought to have very little to do with Halifax, Nova Scotia's Dog Day, who don't even play, in any strict sense, punk music. The band is near the crest of what some critics (though, uh, mostly critics from Atlantic Canada) are calling Atlantic Canada's next big pop wave since the heyday of bands like Eric's Trip and Sloan in the early 1990s. And while it may be hard to credit comparisons to the sweet lo-fi sounds of such groups, it's probably at least as hard to see the connection to any of the brands of sonic theatre-of-cruelty espoused by classic or contemporary punk bands. Dog Day's first release, Thank You, consists of only one expletive, the melodies and rhythms are tight and catchy, everyone can pretty well play their instruments, they are polite, professional performers, and they're not even all that loud. But that doesn't prevent Thank You from being, in the best possible sense, pure white noise.
See, it's not just that the songs fail to express the kind of sentiments -- sorrowful introspection, cleanly projected rage -- that indie audiences most readily identify with. They really don't make much emotional sense at all, even while their not-making-sense suggests the bizarre form taken by internalized emotion when it finally comes out. In his other band, the Burdocks, Dog Day front man Seth Smith has a song about hating and needing his van that is the musical equivalent of white-knuckling the wheel and flooring the gas rather than telling the passengers to fuck off. This is passive aggressive rock at its finest -- all the pathos of emo, all the warts and weirdness of hardcore. Nor does it seem to be a failure of courage that the rage is not made more explicit. In a world where satanic insignia and dog collars have lost their power as icons of rebellion, where there are few symbols left to shock the vast majority of hip liberal listeners, the most clear and unsettling protest might well be this air of exaggerated blankness and conservatism -- embodied, for instance, in a tendency to show up on stage in beige slacks and Mister Rogers cardigans.
The subject matter of Dog Day's songs is at times banal ("If it's in her interest, it's so important"), at times vaguely repugnant ("I take pride in my work, I put care into it, I have a special type of gun"), but always driven by the kind of intensity that, in the absence of any relatable emotional context, comes off as at once uncomfortably intimate and eerily detached. In most cases I'm pretty sure the songs are saying -- give or take a few nuggets about the desperation of not-feeling or the indifference of extremity -- absolutely nothing. Even the title, Thank You, is used as a kind of absolute blank statement, a clean cut that reduces human contact to a system of social hygiene consisting in the "safe and careful words" the narrator refers to in "Use Your Powers".
(It may be helpful here to imagine Smith saying it in his perfect, all-purpose deadpan, always coming off as neither sincere nor sarcastic:
"Here's your beer sir." "Thank you."
"You are a god." "Thank you."
"You're a dead ringer for this sociopath I know." "Thank you."
"Your arm's on fire." "Thank you.")
In "Thank You But No Thank You" -- the most terse and unmelodramatic song about not killing yourself I can think of just now -- the "thank you" is also the narrator's barren answer to the possibility of suicide. And when he decides against it, we get no agonizing over pros and cons, no surge of life or will or fellow-feeling, but only a refusal ("Thank you but no thank you") exactly as arbitrary and inscrutable as the possibility itself. (Oh, and a nice little moment of communion when he offers marriage vows to a smoke: "I, nervous wreck, take you, cigarette".)
Which does not mean that we can pass this over as the usual post-adolescent spasm that glorifies meaninglessness and insists that all is permitted. What Smith has done here seems to me pretty brilliant and even, in its own twisted little way, life-affirming. He's co-opted that energy of negation that animates punk and grunge and maybe rock and roll in general and turned it into not an affirmation, which would be cheap and cheesy here (and is probably the problem with the one relative dud on this album, "Sleeping On Couches" -- a fairly straight-ahead we're-rocking-now anthem that isn't catchy enough to get away with it), but into a little no that gives the slip to the big No of ending it all.
By the way, if it sounds like I'm commending Smith's lyrics, well, I'm not, really. I've read a couple of reviews of this album that single them out for special praise, but the words in these songs work well only insofar as they carry the energy of music to its crisis without making it be too much about anything. They are inoffensive, aesthetically speaking, in that every statement is so stacked with irony that those of us who go into anaphylactic shock at the first trace of cliché or unchecked sentiment can listen fearlessly. The lyrics also do an extraordinary job of sounding desperate without really trying, using jokes, juxtapositions, double-meanings and occasional nonsense to confuse or neutralize every emotion. But most important, the individual elements, while sometimes clever, are nothing special, meaning they never get so deep that you forget to freak out.
I mean, this is it; this is the promise (post-) punk held out to us in its last gasp 20 odd years ago, before a bunch of suburbanites with bad hair got hold of it and turned it into emo. Not just the freaking out, of course (though that's crucial), but a certain limited, pressurized emotional sense, like one gets from early Replacements albums, when Westerberg applies his considerable vocal feeling and verbal facility to lines like "Where are the twinkies?" and "All I wanna do is drink beer for breakfast". The sense, I mean, that this specific form of inarticulateness is the only expression left of how much it hurts to think. That's why my favorite songs on Thank You are the driving, simple "Zombie" and "Love Makes It Mad", the ones that succeed most fully in being about -- precisely, intensely -- nothing. (Well, the latter is probably about sex and the former about depression, but they're both really the psychological equivalent of object poems, taking on common emotions and turning them empty and unfamiliar by magnifying their external features.) It helps, of course, that Smith at his most interesting sounds like a five-year-old on Thorazine, imbuing lines like "I am toxic waste and she's important" and "Kill me with a sword, marry and divorce" with all the grief of a budding serial killer who's just lost his favourite ant-frying glass.
So even with Nancy Urich's clear, light voice sweetening the ironies, I just can't take sympathetically the pain that emanates from this album like a bad smell. Which seems to me to be a good thing -- it's refreshing to see a band deliberately set aside the I-am-pathetic-please-love-me stance of most heartfelt indie rock. Don't get me wrong, the characters sketched on Thank You are thoroughly pathetic, lost, bereft, etc. etc. figures, but these things make them -- according to the logic of actual human contact rather than the prettifications of art -- repellent rather than romantic. In fact, these songs have all the charm of those abused dogs that can't figure out quite what they want from you, growling and whimpering in the same breath, the ones that you can't get out of your head even after they've been banished to the neighbor's yard or the SPCA. You'd like to help, though not quite as much as you'd like them to leave you alone.
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