The Dogs are back with The Grief Manual

Our 2017 started off with the Dogs, and right out the gates for Garagerocktopia for 2018 we have … the Dogs.

Once upon a time, “prolific” was not such a rarely-used word to describe rock bands. Look back at the ‘60s, and the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and so many others were regularly putting out two albums a year, sometimes more. By the ‘80s, it was still common to have one new album out every year. But nowadays, you’re lucky if your favorite band is hitting the studios once every two or three years.

We already knew the Dogs were hard workers, but it’s safe to say they’re positively old-school when it comes to putting out music. 

At the very close of 2016, the Oslo-based group released Death By Drowning. Singer and band leader Kristopher Schau told us then he was just bursting with song ideas all the time.

Folks, he wasn’t kidding around.

The Dogs have just released their latest album, the Grief Manual. Often, when a band follows an album up this quickly, there’s a tendency for songs to sound rushed, half-baked or just have a bunch of rewrites of the most popular tracks from the previous albums. Not so for the new album, which represents steps forward for the band in both songwriting and style.

To hear Schau explain things, this wasn’t even all there was, and, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t

even have to wait 12 more months before the next Dogs album dropped.

“Songs are not the problem, but time is,” Schau confesses, talking with Garagerocktopia by email. “The more we play live, the less time we have to make demos of all the new stuff. We’re at that stage now where our daytime jobs are, well not exactly suffering, but they are sort of pushed to the limit as far as us taking time off to go touring etc.”

“I’m getting old, and this is the band that I want to keep on doing until I die, so I’ve chosen to cut down on the day job from now on, to focus even more on The Dogs. It’ll be less money for fun stuff (like food), but for me The Dogs IS the fun stuff, so that’s gonna work out fine. I hope.”

“Right now it’s all about the next one for us. The one we’ll release next January. I feel like I’ve got 7-8 really good ones ready, and maybe 10-15 that need some work, so I’ll get there. We’ll keep on with the same pace for at least 3 or 4 more years, or hopefully, forever.”

The Grief Manual punctuates (or for them, maybe punk-tu-ates?) a 2017 that, Schau says, went quite well for the band.

“2017 was good to us,” reported Schau. “We had a big tour in the winter, and a nice round of festivals in the summer and even survived the recording session in August. Our organ player quit, so that was a bummer, but we got a new one right off the bat, thank God. Apart from that, everything was sort of nudged up a little last year. We sold more records, sold out more shows, so that was nice.”

“It meant we finally had some extra money and could buy our first van. That poor thing will be tested on icy roads in a couple of weeks. We’re just crossing our fingers that we didn’t get ripped off.”

Schau also wants to make sure the music doesn’t get ripped off, either. Having lots of ideas is one thing, but this band doesn’t want to put out any, dare we say, dogs?

“Creatively, I’m just concerned about the next one,” said Schau. “I still feel like our best album is yet to come. I just have to find it.”

Until Schau puts out that album, The Grief Manual should more than do, because thus far it is the band’s best effort to date. It’s an album that’s more confident, and covers more musical territory than the Dogs have ever done in the past.

A real test of a band’s talent is putting out new music that keeps all the old fans listening but still brings in new ears as well. This is an exceptionally tough thing to do, and even the most legendary rock bands have failed on occasion to do that. If a new CD sounds too much like the previous work, critics like us complain that it’s more of the same. Make it too different, then we start to wonder what happened to the band we like so much.

In our humble opinion, though, the Dogs have managed to hit the bullseye once again.

Background harmonies and second vocalists thus far haven’t been a strong feature of the group’s music, though there was some move in that direction on Death by Drowning. But with “Prelude to Murder,” Schau steps aside on vocals for part of the song, even enlisting some VIP help.

“We had this song that we wanted to do, and for some reason, lyrically, it ended up needing to be a duet with a woman,” explained Schau. “Jorunn Stiansen and her boyfriend have been to a lot of our shows, so we thought ‘hmmm, couldn’t we just ask her?’ She won “Norwegian Idol” back in 2005, so we knew she could sing. We didn’t consciously tell ourselves ‘we need to do something new.’ It was more like ‘wouldn’t it be fun if...’”

“We try to be a yes-band. If somebody has something they want to do, we’ll always try it out. If it works, good. If it doesn’t, then we go on to the next. We never discuss anything more than five minutes. It’s either yes or no. That’s probably why we manage to release a new record every year.”

The 10-song collection retains the Dogs’ snarly ability to rock like crazy. Songs like “The Children He Loves” and “Hindsight” have the band’s trademark punkish edge and should satisfy any fans who’ve been listening to the band over the last several years.

Some of the other rockers, though, lean much more in a classic rock direction, strongly recalling the likes of the Scorpions just before their mega-popularity in the mid-‘80s. Songs like “Oh Why” and “Primitive Etchings” could easily be snuck into the Stranger Things soundtrack and not be noticed.

“Mads, our guitarist, is a huge classic rock fan, so that’s probably where you’re hearing it,” Schau revealed. “Myself, I just make the songs and pass them on to the others who KNOW how to play. I have no idea whatsoever what I’m trying to do. I just move my hands around until something sounds right and then do the same thing with my voice.”

If there’s one distinguishing feature that draws us to the music we write about at here at Garagerocktopia, it’s the energy and the hooks of a tune. We’ll go out on a limb and say that’s probably the draw for most of its devotees. If there’s one criticism you could make to a lot of the music we feature, it’s that it is rarely driven by lyrics. Not that we haven’t profiled some strong lyricists here, and in fact we think lyrics are very important, but it’s generally not the first thing we look at.

Over the last few albums, Schau’s songwriting has grown stronger, displaying an introspection and honesty we don’t see often enough, not just in garage rock or proto-punk (or how ever you would classify their music), but in rock or rock and roll in general. Songs like “Her Last Song” and “The Children He Loves the Least” are the best examples of this increasing capability.

“Funny thing is how hard it is for me to get the lyrics down now,” said Schau. “I thought it would get easier, but I find I’m spending more and more time in front of the computer with each new record. Maybe it’s age, I don’t know. It may have something to do with the audience as well. When people come up to you after a show and tell you that this or that song really meant something to them, you sort of feel responsible to not let them down on the next one. Now that I know that they actually listen, I’m more aware of what I’m making them listen to, I guess.”

While The Grief Manual is not a concept album, like many good works, the songs have a flow and a cohesion about them, intentional or not. By the time the band settled on a name for the new album, the mood had already been set, providing a rudder to Schau’s songwriting.

“On this one I started kind of late with the lyrics, maybe around March, but we had already decided on the album title, The Grief Manual, so that sort of sealed the content for me. With an album title like that, there wasn’t any room for positivity at all. I was afraid it might be a little bit too much for some our listeners, but I stuck with it. So yes, it was an attempt at trying to make an “album”, more than just 10 random songs.”

The Dogs have become more and more a known commodity in the rock and roll world. We’d love to see them here in North America, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that that happens. If there is any justice (please don’t laugh) in the music biz, The Grief Manual will help the band carve out the audience they deserve. While we all keep our fingers crossed that this happens, Schau expresses gratitude to those who are already hip to the music he and the band make.

“I wish you knew how much it means to us that somebody on the other side of the planet listens to our stuff,” said Schau. “It still feels…not weird, but ... I don’t know, humbling or something. It’s a very special feeling that songs I make, sitting in my own living room, mostly in my underwear, somehow manifest themselves halfway across the globe. It’s crazy if you think about it.”

We have some other features already in the works here at Garagerocktopia. Artists have been sending us some very cool stuff. As always, we don’t make any guarantees in stone but we’re happy to say we’ve gotten a lot of very cool stuff sent to us, and we’re always happy to get word out about bands that are playing the kinds of music we profile here. Send us a line and we’ll talk.

Also, we do have a Facebook page for this blog. We don’t put personal stuff on it – no pictures of grandkids or our dinners or politics or anything like that. What we do post are announcements about upcoming features, maybe extra stuff about the bands, and any cool music, movies or TV Shows we stumble across that might have even the most tangential connection with the music featured here. We’re not begging for likes, but, in this day and age, is a little “like” such a bad thing? We don’t think so.