Album Review: Bark Your Head Off, Dog (Hop Along)
You know that feeling when you really get into an album — the songwriting, technique, performance, everything — and then you realize that the band has another album, and it’s totally different? But still great? Just a whole different approach. And then they come out with a third album, and it mixes everything you loved about the first two albums perfectly? That’s not too specific, right?
Bark Your Head Off, Dog, the third album from Hop Along, is what I’m getting at here. I suppose I’ll back up and contextualize, but to clarify, it is a great album that requires no context.
Hop Along’s first album, Get Disowned (not counting the singer’s solo version of the band) is often described as freak-folk, which is a genre, apparently. It is unique though — it’s filled with bizarre sounds and recording techniques (‘Diamond Mine’ starts with the singer beatboxing into a tape recorder, and then playing that over the live take that was recorded). Actually, most of the album was recorded as live takes — the band had built a studio in an old warehouse, and spent about a year putting the songs together. Throughout the album, you’ll hear harps, strings, oddly muted acoustic guitars juxtaposed with gratingly distorted electrics. People always want to talk about Frances Quinlan’s voice, which is truly phenomenal, but everything about this album is perfect.
Three years later, Painted Shut arrived, an entirely different beast. Where Get Disowned is filled with whatever noises the band could find, Painted Shut is more of a rock album. Primary use of guitars, bass and drums puts more emphasis on Quinlan’s voice, which remains marvelous. Songs like Waitress (which I wrote about here) display her full range without asking her to compete against the cacophony that the band built in their first effort. However, the albums are similar in how great they are. They are both consistently moving — it’s almost like they just focus on different characters in the same story.
And this is where Bark Your Head Off, Dog arrives. In their third album, the band reintroduces a little of that old cacophony — strings, heavily delayed drums, even some vocoder, but they maintain their heavier rock presence. The result feels like a unique band that has perfected their voice. They know exactly who they are and what they are doing.
For example, listen to ‘What the Writer Meant,’ probably my favorite song on the album. The dissonant, buzzy guitar intro, the slow build, the cacophony (I know I keep using that that word but it is the only word for this beautiful sound!) of strings, harps, piano — listen in particular to the instrumental melody that starts at 1:20, and transfers between harp (under the vocals) to piano, to guitar, and finally to violin. This kind of symphonic melodic movement is impossible without embracing the multitudes of noises and textures that Hop Along brings into their songs. It’s not chamber-pop though — the orchestra fits perfectly into the rest of the band, rather than replacing or accompanying them.
The album ends with the frantic orchestral arpeggios of ‘Prior Things’ fading into fuzzy static. I’ve honestly never heard anything like it, which is consistent with the rest of the album. Hop Along continue to create challenging and beautiful music, filled with poetry, love, rage, and desperation. They continue to push boundaries in songwriting, recording technique, and performance. I can’t recommend them strongly enough.
Some notes:
- If you really want to nerd out with me, check out Hop Along, Queen Ansleis — Francis Quinlan’s solo version of the band, and listen for the changes that the full band made to her vision.
- Hop Along is on tour! Sell out every show, and if you’re in Chicago, come see them with me in June (2018).
- Here’s an interview with Francis Quinlan about their process on the first couple albums. You can extrapolate for the third one (god knows I did).
