Campdogzz Release Hypnotic Sophomore Album Steeped in Southwestern Atmosphere

On first listening to Campdogzz’s sophomore album In Rounds, what’s striking is the simmering heat seeming to radiate from it. My initial impression was a sensation akin to being alone on a desert highway in the American Southwest at dusk, the sweltering air taking on an ochre tint. A feeling of dry heat struck me, and this honestly came before checking the tracklist to see one of the record’s songs is titled “Dry Heat”. An eerie kismet for sure, but one which coincides with the uncanniness of the record, rife as it is with an earthen, hypnotic quality. Fittingly, core members Jess Price and Mike Russell wrote the bulk of the album while driving in their school bus-turned-tour vehicle through the Southwest. How apt, then, that the arid and orange landscape’s evocative nature saturated their resultant art and manifested in its deft atmosphere.

In Rounds is a natural progression from the Chicago quintet’s 2016 debut LP Riders in the Hills of Dying Heaven and an expansion on the templates they laid down thereon. It takes the hallmarks of that record and advances them with a more flushed out maturity. Centered by Price’s sultry timbre and dusky vocal delivery (bearing a resemblance to a higher-register-capable Chan Marshall or Hope Sandoval), the record seethes with intensity. Sparse and haunting, the predominately mid- or down-tempo songs breathe with a natural, unhurried sensibility, unfurling without getting lost in pointless deviations.

A recurrent motif anchoring the work is “Bobbing on the Plains”, an instrumental of humming keyboards and irregular, scraping percussion. Its first part opens the record, establishing the spooky aura permeating thereafter. The first proper song, “Souvenir”, lurches with a chugging heaviness offset by melodic guitar lines. It rumbles along as a behemoth rising from the sand and slouching forth like the train Price sings of, warbling distortion percolating in the background. The more restrained “Run Wild” follows, built on subtle organ and a tribal-esque drum pattern, with slices of treble cutting through like a lonely wind. “I get lost again,” Price repeatedly intones, replicating the feeling of isolated rootlessness in the listener.

The first standout, “Batshit”, emerges from the second appearance of “Bobbing on the Plains”. It has that indefinable quality of what should be a hit single, opening with spare piano notes and violins screeching like an antiquated locomotive eking its way down rusty tracks. At 20 seconds in, the drums arrive as Price sings the chorus in a wounded yet compassionate style: “Running like batshit if you fall / You’re on your own.” In its third shift before the song hits its one-minute mark, the strings seesaw and the drums pound, Price taking on a defiant resolve. Building to a crescendo, the violins alternate from plaintive to searing. “Rawbone Ring” then proceeds with a surging bassline and exclamatory strikes of piano keys. Its unrelenting tempo induces the sense of fleeing a painful situation and attaining an overdue liberation. Price delivers the rearview mirror wisdom of “Now that we’re older maybe the truth will feel like silk / And you will love me still” just as the song comes to an abrupt halt, the final syllable floating adrift.

The album’s centerpiece, suitably arriving at its midpoint, is the titular track. Glitchy, metronomic percussion drives the tune, the record’s most instrumentally minimal. As such, it allows for a zeroing in of emotional candor, nearly to an uncomfortable degree. “I’m always howling in the face of clouds / Trying to get it out and have some fun,” Price achingly croons above an elegiacally strummed acoustic guitar. The drums unexpectedly come in as she delivers the resignation of “For a while / Not long / I’m gone and bound to get gone again” while an electric guitar’s desolate flourishes pan like a searchlight.

In the album’s latter half, “Dry Heat” stands as a winsome tale of wanderlust, Price cooing over a thumping tempo and swampy strumming. While perhaps emitting a palpable warmth more than any other number — and reflected in its title — the song unfortunately heralds the album’s segue into some redundancy, instrumental-wise. This same issue plagued Campdogzz’s previous record, with the uniformity leading to some of the weaker songs (“On My Own”, Royal Rye”) being overshadowed. However, that these songs struggling to stick to one’s memory are sequential in the second side could be owed to the track order itself, rather than shortcomings in the songs themselves.

With penultimate song “Southern”, a flare of politically righteous indignation wrangles the album back into a tight focus. In an intensifying pulse simulating a barely bridled fury, Price obliquely condemns the southern states’ unsavory history, lingering associated bigotry, and its larger effect on American culture. “You love the southern states / And with them make someone else’s life,” Price sings, casting a socio-critical eye, questioning the sanctimony of those who put the current administration in power: “You mean right (don’t you?) / But it’s a crude law.”

The only glaring headscratcher is closer “Sorceress”. A delicate acoustic tune sung by guitarist Mike Russell, it has an alternative country feel reminiscent of Will Oldham. The song is fine in itself, but its placement at the end of the record is baffling. As the lone number sung by Russell and with a decidedly different instrumental approach from the preceding cuts, it sounds tacked-on, and can jar the first-time listener into thinking a different band’s song accidentally found its way onto the record. Maybe if it had been placed elsewhere in the tracklist, or another one or two songs sung by Russell had been included, it could have showcased this aspect of Campdogzz’s diversity, as opposed to feeling like its inclusion was a begrudging tossing of a bone.

This and minor late-stage fatigue aside, In Rounds is a compelling record. Its world-weary road trip vibe and recurrent emotional devastation conjure images of what it must be like to tour a post-apocalyptic cityscape where ashy fallout has long settled on the barren structures, driving past vacant buildings of shattered windows and crumbling facades. That an album can inspire such vivid imagery and impressions in this era abounding in social dread is among its strongest attributes, and makes it an important document of this zeitgeist.