In their second offering as a band, Dog Bite leave little evidence of growth or, more importantly, purpose. It’s the Atlanta-based side-project of Washed Out keyboard player Phil Jones, whose love for all things wavy invites poor choices musically and lyrically at every turn. Where there’s a chance for a new color in his palette, Jones opts for the same icy guitars and the vaguest of moods. Where there’s a chance to have a song about something concrete, Jones opts for the most basic existential quandaries. He sets the bar so low yet still manages to trip over it and fall into a space once fertile with chillwave and shoegaze bands that's now an airless voidscape with salted soil and a decrepit sign that reads: “Vibes.” This is the environment Dog Bite creates, much like last year's Velvet Changes only more torpid and morose. Welcome.
Jones said he was inspired by a new set of sounds on this record, soul guys like Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes. This is apparent on Tranquilizers insofar as Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes are categorized as musicians much in the same way as Dog Bite, Frédéric Chopin and Nikki Sixx are also categorized as musicians. Beyond that, the analogue gets a little muddy. The sounds of Stax records filtered through a complex pedal board short-circuited with a bottle Codiene might get you there. But any actual soul on the record is obfuscated by a pastiche of effects-laden synths and guitars that don’t play music so much as they play at music, writing toward a feeling or an impression. Jones said of the album, "It’s music that just wants to hang out a little bit, talk about the universe, and then go home." Which is to say the album strives to have the same kind of relationship as you had with Gavin, the guy who always wore a baja hoodie and had a Volcano vaporizer he called Mount Doom.
Luckily there’s “Wonder Dark”, one of the only songs whose textures are varied enough to raise an eyebrow. It has shape to it, it bellows a bit with the arrangement, and the guitars start to resemble something like coiled tension. But just as quickly as it arrives, Tranquilizers slips back into laminated shoegaze with "Dream Feast" and the rest. It's cavernous, yes, but a bass-heavy production with delayed treble guitar is dynamic once, not over and over again.
Take, too, the rhetorical questions that Jones offers throughout in his anemic half-baritone voice. “Where do we go?” and, “So what am I supposed to be?” are some hooks highlighted on the record, statements so vapid and feckless they make the bulk of Twitter on any given day seem Pulitzer-worthy. Even in performing music so instantly categorizable and comfortable, Dog Bite pretend to be lost souls who just want to ask the big questions. “Please help me” goes the chorus to “Royals” as a kind of meta-comment as the album slogs on at the same sub-marine trip-hop tempos on into its 30th minute.
Tranquilzers does very little to reinvigorate or recontextualize chillwave or shoegaze and does even less to signify innovation on its own terms. Its main crime is that it's aggressively safe and begs to be classified as nothing other than a rank and file Washed Out side project. Late last year, Jones put up a mixtape of personal influences which include dusty groove artists like Byrdie Green and Dorthy Ashby. It's beyond frustrating that the sharp mood of those reggae and soul songs that influence Jones are spread out paper-thin in monochromatic streaks. Toro Y Moi have moved on to lean disco-funk and Washed Out put a focus on textural variation by using over 50 different instruments on Paracosm. Dog Bite are about as late to the vibe party as possible. To say the songs are lifeless is to only pinpoint part of the problem—they are absent of the stuff that make music enjoyable to listen to.
