Dog Unit
At Home
BRACE YOURSELF
When has a major-seventh chord ever let anyone down? Tell me your ears haven’t craved the completeness of a V-I perfect cadence (knowingly or not), or recoiled from the tritone’s orgiastic dissonance. Words, on the other hand, can be unreliable, cumbersome, or lost in translation. In music, sickly storytelling or hackneyed sloganeering may ruin otherwise attractive instrumentals. Voices grate with hissing S’s and splodges of spit land on mics and front rows. London’s Dog Unit muzzle their bark and instead, inspired by forebears such as Chicago’s Tortoise and Düsseldorf’s NEU!, experiment with the building blocks of Western tonality via a democratized, fat-trimmed setup: guitar, bass, drums, and Omnichord. The four players converse with one another, reading minds rather than lips, lost in the infinite combinations of intervals and rhythms.
To be clear, At Home is not ambient background fodder of the theta waves or field recordings variety. Nor is it a series of rambling, eyes-shut guitarscapes. The debut still rocks, still pops, and still says something. The title of each track hints at a picture that the music expands upon. For instance, opener “Concrete Barges on the Banks of the Thames” is transportive and landscape-driven, its world of watery harmonics beginning the album gently and evoking the steady bobbing of barges behind a sleepy sunrise. At the other end, “The Dogs Are Barking Again” suggests a sigh passed between bedmates as night swallows the city. Ominous arpeggios play back and forth with milky organ tones, shading the late-night scene’s fading light.
In between, there’s plenty of get-up-and-go—plenty of action—even as most tracks surpass the five-minute mark. The guitars seamlessly glide between bluesy fret-busting, velvety jazz inversions, and amorphous wah-wah tones. Motorik beats press ahead as everyone else tangles themselves in Branca-esque indulgence. Indeed, it’s music to get lost in, but you won’t forget it’s playing. Certainly not during moments such as the shrieking séance that is “John X Kennedy” or, conversely, the beguiling ballad “In a Magic World, Then Yes,” which swoons with slide guitar and sounds like Yo La Tengo when they marry their avant-garde and country-music proclivities.
Another band with which Dog Unit shares DNA is Mogwai, the Glaswegian post-rock mavericks whose success was ostensibly written in the stars. Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home,” they exclaimed with their debut album, as though an act of manifestation. At Home also has a sense of freedom and possibility, thronging with ideas that the quartet synergizes and summarizes in the interest of economy. The difference is that Dog Unit are content where they are. If they stay in one place, the world will come their way soon enough.
