Fat Dog Bark Their Debut Album Into a Circus

I saw Fat Dog play their first-ever US show at New York’s TV Eye, where they stopped by before making waves at SXSW (including at Paste‘s East Austin Block Party). Frontman Joe Love walked on stage wearing a lab coat and a ushanka hat, which certainly could not have been comfortable in the increasingly sweaty venue. Drummer John Hutchinson took it further and donned a dog mask. In his mad scientist get-up, Love bellowed, “I’m the king of the slugs, bitch!” He flicked his wrists to pave an aisle through the middle of the crowd, strutted down that path and then beckoned everyone to crouch down and spring up at the beat drop. Love’s crowd-directing techniques were unconventional and, frankly, hilarious. People didn’t quite know where to go, so they went everywhere, jumping along to the band’s parodical saxophone blurts. Fat Dog’s live sets exist in the space between humor and intensity. Their industrial bass lines shook the room. But on stage, the band operates with cartoonish glee, fascinated and removed from the flurry of the crowd. It’s both a laugh and a sneer.

The debut album of the South London five-piece is aptly titled WOOF., and it’s a microcosm of their live show: rambunctious and odd and best when it’s loud. But the real tension that keeps WOOF. afloat is that, like their live shows, you can never quite tell if you’re in on the joke. And that’s because, as hard as they go, Fat Dog songs are also kind of silly. Take “King of the Slugs,” the seven-minute lead single: Over a thick, acidic bassline, Love rants and raves about his titular royalty status. He barks it out, and the band crests to a drop. But instead of a punkish release, they veer into a melody that sounds like it was pulled from a Klezmer band (for my music theory nerds: it’s the fifth mode of the harmonic minor, traditionally used in Klezmer). Halfway through the track, Love chants “the wall,” and the song accelerates like a demented, half-awake polka. “King of the Slugs” takes the path of most resistance from its start to end, tumbling through tempo changes and halftimes like the town drunk. But still, it’s dance music, warped through Fat Dog’s perverse, vampiric sensibility.

The WOOF. opener, “Vigilante,” commences with a timpani hit and Love bellowing, “It’s fucking Fat Dog, baby!”—immediately reminding me of the intro to The Muppet Show. Love monologues over a villainous orchestra, proclaiming that he “watched the first man draw blood from the second man, saw the first death and the failure of flesh.” It’s so cinematic and macabre that it crests into irony. Still, they churn out a hook from all that verbose nonsense. Almost every track on WOOF. follows this pattern. They layer up synths and strings until they’re comically grandiose, and then the band snaps into a bouncy hook. The build-up is just hot air. When they drop, they mean business.

Keyboardist Chris Hughes describes the band’s sound as “the polar opposite of thinking music.” Fat Dog are at their best when they lean into that mindlessness and make body music. Highlights like “Closer to God,” “Wither” and “Running” are dance-rock anthems with a menacing aura, as if they were brought to you by Dracula. “All the Same” circles around a thick, elastic bass synth. “You’re all the same / To me!” Love shouts, and a fist-pump feels implied. Often, saxophonist Morgan Wallace and drummer Josh Hutchinson channel Fat Dog’s “opposite of thinking music” ethos best. Their raucous playing suits the album’s carnivalesque world, like the blaring sax solo over the throb of “Wither” or the hi-hats speeding through “Closer to God.”

In press materials, Love says he started Fat Dog because he “wanted to make something ridiculous because [he] was so bored.” WOOF.’s melodrama is all about getting out of a holding pattern and shaking away the malaise. Sometimes, it leans too far into its theatricality to be the barreling, hedonistic music it gestures toward. But at its best, Fat Dog is a circus. It’s about thrills, novelty and big-tent grandeur. Love plays its ringleader—bordering on megalomaniac—as he declares over and over that he is “the king” on “I Am the King.” But when you look a little closer at the album’s funhouse mirrors and ask what kingdom he’s ruling over, the joke’s on you. There isn’t anything. “It means nothing at all,” Love admits on the same song. For a spectacle like this, there doesn’t need to be.

Andy Steiner is a writer and musician. When he’s not reviewing albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on Instagram or Twitter.