that dog. Is the Best Band You've Never Heard

Or maybe not: I don’t know what bands you’ve heard. I will say they definitely win the best-band-worst-name award. Apparently the members were inspired by a particularly tragic bit of roadkill. Kids, don’t name your band after roadkill. Why they didn’t capitalize the words (ugh) and why they added a period (double ugh) is beyond me. I hate punctuation in band names (looking at you, Panic! At the Disco). Hell, I don’t even like pronouns and prepositions in band names (looking at you, Panic! At the Disco).

But the music! Actually, before the music, the facts: the band originally consisted of Anna Waronker on vocals and guitar, Petra Haden on backup vocals and violin, Rachel Haden on backup vocals and bass, and Tony Maxwell on drums. Some random trivia:

• Petra and Rachel are, along with their sister Tanya, the triplet daughters of bassist Charlie Haden, who is apparently a Very Important Jazz Person.

• Tanya is married to high school classmate Jack Black, which must have broken Gene Ween’s heart, because he wrote the song “Stay Forever” for her.

• Rachel was slated to sing on Weezer’s unfinished masterpiece Songs from the Black Hole. We may never have gotten the record, but we did get a few absolute bangers like “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams.”

• The band’s original drummer was SNL alum Maya Rudolph (who would go on to achieve musical greatness of her own).

• Tony was Nicolas Cage’s body-double in the Spike Jonze movie Adaptation.

• Everyone in the band has played in a bunch of other So-Cal bands and met a bunch of other So-Cal celebrities and generally led a more interesting life than me.

The genre is…tricky? They match a lot of specific-to-the-point-of-silliness sub-genres. The most obvious is pop-punk, but what kind of punk band has a violin player? Maybe they’re just 90s alternative? The band is three-quarters female: perhaps riot grrrl applies? I don’t know. The violin might make them sound less punk—you aint gonna hear one on a Sex Pistols track—but it makes them feel more punk, because what could be more punk than hey I’m starting a band with my sister and her friends and oh yeah she plays the violin so we’re gonna have a violin in it okay cool?1

The band has released four albums. To keep things manageable, I’ll limit myself to three songs from each one.

that dog.’s2 eponymous debut is merely excellent, not perfect, but everything I love about the band is already there: the beginner chords, the crunchy guitars, the sardonic lyrics—that violin—the gorgeous lead vocals and even more gorgeous harmonies. Their first single “Old Timer” is a decent introduction to their sound. Plus, it has an appropriately 90s novelty music video directed by Spike Jonez (which must be how Tony got the body-double gig).

My favorite track on the album is “Family Functions.” The violin is front and center, there’s an unexpected tempo change midway through, and the band proves they know how and when to end a song. The lyrics ask the timeless question are we serious or not?, but great art explores the universal through the specific, so the lyrics instead ask will you meet my family or not?:

Now that you are my most special one,
And you know we’ve already gone to the prom,
Won’t you come with me to family functions?
Won’t you be the one that I’ve got on my arm?

By the time the singer starts listing oddball facts about her extended family, I’m in love with her myself. Listing things is, after all, the best way to write great poetry:

Grandpa Earl runs his own kosher fish store.
Uncle Max was in the mob.
Cousin Lester married a shiksa.
Crazy Aunt Ingas can’t find a job.

Speaking of exploring the universal through the specific, here is—and I’m making this up on the spot—a boring way to describe depression:

I can’t sleep at night
The whole world is grey.
Nothing feels all right.
I’m sad every day.

And here’s a much better way to describe depression:

Paid programming
Helps me sleep at night,
Tucked in bed so tight.
Paid programming
Helps me sleep at night,
Cures me of my fright.

I’d like a Strawberry Whip Delight
To give me pleasant dreams at night,
And I’d like to see the vacuuming haircut machine
Going mainstream.3

I remember, when I was at my very lowest in college, staying up till four in the morning, in a need of a shower, clammy and cold, hating the world and hating myself while I rewatched the same old shit on TV instead of doing the one thing that would have helped: going to bed. That’s the sort of life you lead when you’re depressed. This plunky, delicate, minor-key song knows how it really works.

Totally Crushed Out! is a perfect album with a perfect title and a perfect cover.

Freddie deBoer has written about how some types of people are never taken seriously in art. His example was the wankster in Richard Kelly’s gonzo trainwreck of a film Southland Tales. And yeah, it’s hard to take some suburban kid cluelessly aping gangster culture seriously. It’s not that we have to refrain from judging his silliest choices; it’s certainly not that we have to assume he contains hidden fonts of wisdom; it’s that, even if you are a silly person, when you’re laughing with friends or you fall in love or you get your heart broken, all those feelings are real, true, human feelings. I should know: when I was young my emotions burned much too bright, and I was a silly person myself.

That’s what Totally Crushed Out! does. It gives voice to a group of people never taken seriously by our culture: teenage girls. And it doesn’t do so by obscuring the way they talk or pretending every fifteen-year-old is Sylvia Plath. Take another look at that cover: this album leans in to the language of adolescence. The lines,

‘Cause I keep putting on lip gloss,
And you won’t kiss me,

are the simplest, rawest representation of teenage desire ever dreamed up. (Of course, the frenetic tempo and heavy distortion help, while the harmonies, as pretty as they are, manage to come off as totally unhinged—listen to how they end the song.) Christ I wish I had heard “Lip Gloss” in junior high. Maybe I would have realized what all those crushes were trying to tell me :(

“He’s Kissing Christian” is about having a crush on a boy who prefers the company of men.4 Amazingly, it manages to center the girl’s feelings without devolving into homophobia. The violin solo is as beautiful as always, and this is a good opportunity to point out that, while the drums aren’t showy, they are exactly what I want from pop-punk drumming.

I believe I illegally downloaded “Silently,” the first that dog. song I ever heard, on some Napster clone.5 The “do-do-do-do-do-do”s in this song are, like the harmonies on “Lip Gloss,” delightfully unhinged. And the lyrics, documenting how some clueless boy affects his crush without even knowing it, are eminently relatable: looking back at my own high school days, I believe I played both of those roles at least once. Being a teenager is hard.

This album gets less love than Totally Crushed Out! but is, in fact, also perfect. Some might say it’s too poppy, but fuck it, I love poppy. Just listen to “Never Say Never.” That piano that in the second verse! That violin solo! That guitar solo after that violin solo! It’s a perfect little diamond of a pop song, nothing missing, nothing superfluous. Also, if you’ll allow me a little shameless objectifying, Anna Waronker rocking a vintage keyboard in a skintight romper and high-heel boots is the hottest goddamn thing to come out of the 90s.

But Rachel Haden is my real crush. She looks like an even prettier version of my high school algebra teacher. Sigh.

The band’s most popular song is “Minneapolis.” I am fine with this: it’s an excellent track with an excellent opening riff. Once again, the band expertly explores real pathos through the language of a youth:

I was at the Jabberjaw.
The cutest boy I ever saw,
He was standing behind me.
He was such a dream.
He kept looking right my way.
I wanna see him every day.
Randy told me where he lives:
In Minneapolis.

When I am in the right mood—overcome by nostalgia and stuck in the past—this song wrecks my day. Sliding doors, sliding doors.

You know what? I take back what I said earlier. “Lip Gloss” doesn’t have the simplest, rawest lines on teenage desire ever written. “Long Island” does. Never forget, folks,

By definition a crush must hurt.

After releasing an album every two years smack dab in the middle of the 90s, that dog. broke up. They never really made it big. Oh well. Most bands don’t. But I was always disappointed they had one excellent album followed by two perfect albums instead of three equally perfect outings. Then, twelve years later, they released Old LP.

Holy shit do I love this record.

Every track is an absolute 10/10 classic. The production does want I always want the production to do: allow the band to sound recognizably like themselves while also treating each track as its own little kingdom: the instrumentation, structure, and sound carefully tailored to each song.

Case in point: “Just the Way” begins on a discordant note, the crunchy guitars coming in a beat late and working against the drums. The dissonance works the same way a jalapeno works, adding just enough bite to keep things from becoming too sweet. But when the second part of the verse hits thirty seconds in, the more typical rhythm just swings in contrast. It makes me want to stroll down the street like an animated pimp.

Every detail is chosen with care, from the triangle at 1:16 to the updated instrumentation on the second verse to the pitch-perfect “ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha”s at 2:30.6

Whenever I listen to “If You Just Didn’t Do It” with my six-year-old, she spends the rest of the day running around the house sing-shouting “If you JUST didn’t do it, THEN you wouldn’t do it, and you wouldn’t be here RIGHT NOW!!!”

They’re fantastic lyrics, a tautological rebuke to the sort of man who lets you down before groveling back with an apology yet again:

I wrote you a letter,
But I knew that you would read it wrong,
So I thought this was better,
In case you want to sing along.

Self-referential lyrics are catnip to me, and these are made all the more withering by the harmonized final line and ensuing silence.7 There is such genius in finding the perfect match of sound and sense.

“Bird on a Wire” is sonically epic. When I crank it in the car and sing along I experience a physical swelling. Jesus, listen to the harmonies on the chorus. That shit breaks me wide open.

Harmonies are such a cheat code to good music. Even more than the violin, they define that dog.’s sound. I wish they were used, like, ten times more often in popular music. I once heard a sound engineer play “Satellite of Love” for a documentary. Toward the end of the song he suddenly cut all the tracks except David Bowie’s backing vocals. The effect was astonishing. I remember thinking bands should purposefully use that trick. Well, listen to the last thirty seconds of this song.

I also love the lyrical conceit:

This is all I’ve ever known and it’s all I’ve ever done.
I’m a bird on a wire, just like everyone,
A bird on a wire, and I’m tired of facing the sun.

In so much of literature darkness is seen as scary and bad while light is seen as safe and good. But here the light is overwhelming, blinding, even bleaching, something she longs to turn away from but can’t.

Welp, time to break my own rule and include a fourth song. “Old LP” is the final track of (for now) the final album.

When I first heard this record I thought the title was The Old LP, as in, the LP about being old. It was faintly depressing to think that’s what Anna Waronker and company wanted to focus on. But then I heard this song and realized, no, this is a track about listening to an old LP:

I guess I hate the fact
That you’re not coming back.
I never wanted you to leave.
I hate that there’s no choice
That I can’t hear your voice
Unless it’s on an old LP.

So what this final statement actually emphasizes is the ability to connect to another human being across time and space through a work of art, a sentiment which does not depress me at all. It makes sense that, in the mini-documentary on making the album, Anna says she wanted to get the band back together after Charlie Haden died.

I love this finale. It sounds like that dog. recorded a lost Ennio Morricone song. It also sounds like a victory lap from a band that knows they just created something special—there’s a reason it ends with applause.

Every once in a while I’ll check out some band I loved from the 90s—Third Eye Blind or Everclear or Green Day—and see that they’re still releasing albums. Most of the time it seems, well, pretty pathetic.8 There they are, thirty years past their debut, fifteen records in, churning out music and riding the tour bus. I should feel the same way about that dog. releasing a fourth album twelve years late, but the record is just too damn good. It’s a masterpiece, every last note, and so it doesn’t matter if the band doesn’t blow up, if the young people roll their eyes, if it gets less than ten thousand plays on Spotify.

I’m a poet: it’s my inclination to say an unappreciated masterpiece is better than a popular mediocrity. And that dog. pulled it off. They finally got their three perfect albums. Listen to them belt out the chorus to “Old LP” with bravado and longing and joy, and you will know exactly what I mean.