Album review: Dog Day's Night Group

Originally posted Monday, August 13, 2007

On the last, untitled track of their first album, Thank You, Dog Day, a band known best for its intricate pathologies of toxic relationships and numbing isolation, attempts something that sounds suspiciously like a love song. “…” is a lo-fi sketch of an interstellar soundscape, complete with gloopy synths and staticky dead air straight out of some 70’s sci-fi flick about a nuclear holocaust.Trembling wires and whistling space – then the sound of our hero’s final transmission, the last martian radioing the last living earthling, asking – no, demanding, since a touch is as good as a blow in the void – that they join the lumpy, gelatinous bodies in some last semblance of comfort: “Come on, come on. I’m the last man alive. You belong to me. You have no choice. There’s no end in sight.”It’s a perversely sweet moment on a thoroughly unsweet album, a tenderness no less real for arising more out of exhaustion than conviction, husband coaxing wife at the end of one of those all-night fights they’re always having, making the same perfectly banal, perfectly cutting criticisms of each other, again and again. “Yeah, we suck,” he seems to say. “But at least we have that in common.”That odd, double-edged sweetness, is front and centre in Dog Day’s latest offering, Night Group. Here, frontman Seth Smith sounds like he’s realized for the first time that he’s not alone in his misery, that the things that make it so hard to relate to the rest of the world are really pretty common. “Everyone’s got the same problems”, he admits on “Career Suicide”, and the result is an album both darker and more hopeful than Thank You – less obsessed with private failures of communication, animated by a wider vision of suffering and even (sort of) redemption.Actually, Night Group is an album about the end of the world, about those last coherent chunks of DNA floating together in the void, united by a common disaster. Everything Thank You avoided through neurotically clever jokes, wordplay, convolutions of thought and feeling is faced head on here, in a self-induced dark night of the soul. The title track speaks of facing “the evening of soul deliverance” with neither medicine nor religion to soften the passage; “End of the World” (much like Thank You’s “…”) finds the upside of Armageddon in the destruction of those troubling distractions from intimacy, other people.Song by song, the album acknowledges, mourns and mocks the familiar cushions and consolations that keep a safe distance between life and death – love (“Sleeping, Waiting”, “Know Who You Are”), marriage (“Vow”), ambition (“Defeat”, “Bright Light”), “fun”, i.e. drinking and making noise, (“Night Group”) – each is considered, dragged through the murk of Smith’s deadpan vocals and the stretto of narrow electronic harmonies, and abandoned.A few tracks almost come clear, like “…” sweetened rather than ruined by ambivalence. “Sleeping, Waiting” sings of love and catatonia: a quick bright guitar pattern over one, droning synth note. The narrator’s asleep, lost to the world, and nothing can rouse him, not even a lover’s presence in bed with him. But he feels her, in glimpses, comforting fragments, like an outside sound distinct enough to burrow into his dreaming, not quite enough to dissolve it.“Bright Light”, a more self-conscious answer to Counting Crows’ “Mister Jones”, is about that great and stupid yearning for transcendence leftover from adolescence, desiccated by chronic poverty and depression but not dead, not yet. More acoustically spacious than the rest of Night Group, with cathedrals of reverb opening on the “Amen” chorus (sung by Nancy Urich with churchly solemnity), “Bright Light” is a joke on all those old, vague dreams, yet manages to get sucked back into dreaming despite itself. “Can I have twenty dollars?” Smith cracks. “Can I have twenty wives, oh God?” - but his chronically flat, I-just-killed-my-parents-and-I-want-a-cheeseburger voice keeps breaking, and the song’s determinedly pessimistic refrain, “I will never find the bright light”, keeps turning back into a question.For the most part, though, Night Group finds its footing best in its darkest corners. The strongest tracks, “Gayhorse”, “Oh Dead Life” and “Great Pains”, conjure up a purity of bleakness mitigated only by its familiarity. “I keep hearing voices,” Smith sings on “Gayhorse”, “they tell me where we’re going”. You can tell, from the gloomy synths, and from Urich’s eerie counterpoint, that it’s nowhere good, and yet there’s an odd, unmistakable consolation here, as if the place didn’t matter so much as the fact of going somewhere, and having it given, as if even hell could be borne so long as you knew its name, an affirmation that all the bad things yet to come had already happened and nothing was required, nothing more you could do now to make it right.