In the first couple of months of a new year, many contemplate what the next 365 days will have in store for them -- will it be a good year, or one with lots left to be desired? For those of us who write about rock and roll, the questions often becomes is this the year we get the next Tommy? or the next Sgt. Pepper? Or will it just be a dozen more like Chinese Democracy?
Here at Garagerocktopia, we never claimed to be the Amazing Criswell or Kreskin or Uri Geller. We can’t really prognosticate on how 2019 will turn out for the world, or really, even for ourselves. But we can report about something we’ve come to really dig here at the start of every new year for the last four years: a new Dogs album.
The Oslo-based band has released new albums at the beginning of January the last few years running, and here in 2019, the tradition continues. The Dogs’ latest outing is Before Brutality, which sports the band’s vintage crunch but adds some new touches, additions that should especially please the garage-punk contingent. And no worries, it’s not even close to being their Let It Be.
Led by singer and songwriter Kristopher Schau, the band once again offers up 10 brand-new agnst-drenched songs, all of which avoid mopiness thanks to tons of high-energy guitars, crunching beats and rhythms. For years, the band’s stock as one of Norway’s best rock bands has been rising, and Before Brutality should do no harm at all to that trajectory.
The band also includes guitarist Mads Martinsen, Roar Nilsen on bass, Kenneth Simonsen on percussion, and drummer Henrik Odde Gustavsen.
As with previous releases, the band perfect straddles that line between keeping what longtime bands expect to hear on a Dogs album on one side, but adding just enough new touches to keep the material from sounding like an outtake basket from their previous album. While the albums aren’t exactly concept albums, as Schau has suggested in previous interviews, he does look for musical and lyrical threads to tie the albums together.
“When the album title was decided we knew we had to make the overall sound on this one a bit more aggressive,” explained Schau, talking to Garagerocktopia by email. “We also wanted to make sure we had enough fast ones on the album. We actually recorded 13 songs and it was the ones that we felt wasn’t within the concept of the title that we chose to let go.”
“Or, that’s not entirely correct, we didn’t let them go. We just released the three leftovers and seven other songs on an LP that we only sell after our shows to make sure they are not lost forever, Basically, you have to show up at one of our shows to buy that record and hear those songs.
In those times that we’ve been lucky enough to talk to Schau, he has never appeared to be very concerned about which musical box listeners might want to place the Dogs in. To our ears, the band seems more punk/proto-punk than anything else; to others maybe the band leans more Skandi-Rock. With Before Brutality, though, the band sounds more garage than ever. Schau said that’s because the band wanted to put more of a spotlight Stefan Höglin’s keyboards.
“We wanted to make use of Stefans abilities as a musician and push the organ up front,” said Schau. “He had just joined us just weeks before recording our previous album, and this time he had the chance to actually hear the songs before going into the studio. He’ll probably be even more prominent on the next one. He’s a well we haven’t even started to dip in to, I think. Expect more organ solos and licks in 2020.”
Cuts like “At the Birth of a Song” and “The End Has Begun” sound like garage rock with booster rockets attached, while “Let’s Start a Riot” and “Lord Knows the Fiction Has Worn Out” make the Dogs sound just a wee bit like the Stranglers, a band they’re sometimes compared to, but juiced up with a whole crate of nitroglycerin.
The band’s previous album, the Grief Manual, saw Schau for the first time share a microphone with another singer, former Norwegian Star winner Jorunn Stiansen. Before Brutality also features a female singer, but one with an even bigger name. Unfortunately, though the voice is very familiar and we have our suspicions of who it is, that identity will have to stay a mystery.
“Ah, it’s not Jorunn this time, but another friend of ours,” said Schau. “What happened was, this woman, who we can’t name, was at the same party as our drummer and they both thought it would be fun if she came along into the studio to lay down some backing vocals. All good for now. The day came. We found a suitable song, “The End Has Begun”, but when I reread the lyrics I found out that if she did a whole verse on her own and not just backing vocals, the lyrics in themselves somehow became better. This song of violence suddenly would become almost romantic. It would be a dialogue instead of a monologue.”
“So she laid down the vocals and they were perfect. The only problem was she hadn’t talked to her own record company about this and they didn’t like it all. She’s WAY bigger than us, streaming in the multi-millions, and doing vocals for a small rock band with middle-aged men from Oslo was not their idea of good marketing. So they told her she couldn’t have her name on the album, the song could never be released as a single and we were never to reveal her name. It was fine for us really. We just wanted the song to be as good as possible, but we feel sorry for her, cause she did a great job and no-one will ever know it was her.”
The Dogs have always been experts at cranking out fist-pumping music, but those raucous beats and driving hooks have most often belied fairly dark lyrics. Yet Schau, at least in the times we’ve talked to him, has never come across as particularly dour. Anyone who’s ever seen interviews with the outwardly well-adjusted Trent Reznor knows that anguished lyrics from seemingly contented souls isn’t all that unusual -- like actors and comedians, singers often have their personas. For Schau, his lyrical bleakness just basically flows out without much thought.
For Schau, in large part, he just doesn’t want to come off as a lightweight.
“How can I get a song to feel important or relevant in any kind of way, emotionally?,”Schau retorts. “And the easiest way for me then is going down the darkest ally I can possibly find. Most of the time I have this image in my head of a young man that I project all that stuff on to. For some reason, and I don’t know why, I picture him living in the suburbs of some rotten town in the northern parts of England just trying to get by.”
“I don’t know why I keep torturing him this way, but at least he’s fictional. And it’s therapeutic for me, I guess, cause I’m really, really happy this days. I promise!”
That’s not to say that Before Brutality is just a big fat mope-fest. “Who’s Gonna Pay?” is one of the album’s best rockers and one with a bit of cheeky humor.
“We’ve always, at least I have, had most fun coming up with the choruses,” Schau revealed. “It’s just something really, really fulfilling about a melody that turns up from nowhere and manifests itself into something you can walk around and hum to for days. So we wanted more of that, and it translated into the verses becoming a bit more melodic as well.”
It has been clear for the past few years that the Dogs hard work -- shall we say, dogged efforts -- have propelled their reputation, especially in Norway. Their gigs are routinely sold out, and in the last few years, they have opened for the likes of Bruce Springsteen. In 2018, the group achieved a rather oddball milestone, one that may not exactly translate to headlining stadium dates, but one that makes for a very cool resume item nonetheless.
“We were actually the most selling band on vinyl in Norway last year,” Schau told us, “beating Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, which was fun. But, and that’s a big “but”, that doesn’t mean we sold loads of records. It only means we are a vinyl band in an age of streaming.”
“But still, you know, it’s good from a promotional point of view. We are still not able to turn this into any form of a living, but we are definitely on the up. The shows are mostly sold out and the overall spirit in the band is better than ever, so we are a happy bunch right now.”
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 promising music sent to us, and we’re always happy to spread the word about about bands that are playing the way-out 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. While we don't spend all day thinking about it, we do like "likes" if you're so inclined ...
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