- Dog Chocolate is an achingly fun punk punk band from the UK. They’re three records deep into what has to been an astounding feat of dedication to their introspective, socially-conscious but non-committal punk comedy. Their new LP, Moody Balloon Baby, presents a somewhat more sophisticated shift towards social self-consciousness, pitted against an even more distinct and evasively comical approach to everyday life and social justice. At times, their sound resembles a more shambolic and dysfunctional Deerhoof, with a couple of men at the front trading vocals and shouting over each other, other times they sound more like a parody hardcore band.
Dog Chocolate are a band engaged with political and social thought without the baggage of certainty or clarity. They pursue an everyday kind of engagement with criticality that doesn’t glorify or disaffect itself with seriousness, rather consciously poking fun at the absurdities and injustices of the world they inhabit and the overly self-critical concern to be better than you are or possibly can be. Dog Chocolate are about forcing yourself to engage with the lingering thoughts and feelings about things that you have no expertise or experience with.
In this way, Moody Balloon Baby begins with the anthemic Amateurs Forever. A track of wonky guitar noodling that builds to a driving chorus of noisy guitar and a shouted flatulent military cadence. This is Dog Chocolate's work song. The vaguely call and response structure between vocalists Robert and Andrew leaves echoes through the rest of the record, presenting a cohesive, pressure-sensitive version of Dog Chocolate. Clocking in at just about twenty-five minutes, each song packs a punch in a short burst of cathartic energy, the songs range from short and intense ditties (Gone Viral, Animals Don’t Give A Shit About Your Art), to experimentally bizarre vignettes about modern life (The CDR’s Won’t Last, Gone Viral) and to lividly humourous conundrums (How Can We Destroy The Museum?, Dog Chocolate 1995, Tesco Flag).
With humour and awareness, they present thoughts as they are, not particularly refined but consciously performed, with an abundance of humour and self-aware wit. Dog Chocolate 1995 looks at music as a fleeting signifier of youth culture past and a pale rose-tinted reflection of better times through an imaginary tale of someone recalling seeing the Dog Chocolate in the year 1995, it being a life changing experience that they now revisit mentally at mundane moments. The music is memorable and punchy across the board and not limited in range, there's lines of hamonica and junk percussion, and an abundance of guitar effects like What’s The Crux's moody guitar harmonics and chilling synth like stabs.
Dog Chocolate feels encouraging and expressive. It’s direct vocals and instrumentation makes it relatable, and deeply human. It also stands as a statement against art as rumination on the injustices of the world, instead opting for cathartic bursts of personal expression. It embraces artist's inability to conceive of any real solution to the vast problems of the world and the minimal escapism that the creative act gives. Through absurdity and evasion of seriousness, Dog Chocolate pick at the discarded pile of scabs of our wasteful culture and holds up a grotestquely, hiliariously relatable chunk of ourselves.
- Jaden Gallagher.