When Fat Dog, the UK’s latest post-punk export, hopped on tour with Viagra Boys last year, they enraged a few fans riding hard for the headliner. “We got a lot of hate from people because they didn’t want to see the support act ‘out-do’ anyone,” Fat Dog frontman Joe Love explained to NME this spring. Fuming that the South London five-piece were punching above their weight, one dissatisfied concertgoer accused Love of being “arrogant,” calling him “a tiny little prick,” as Fat Dog keyboardist Chris Hughes remembered.
I’ve never seen Fat Dog live, but their reputation as performers has made its way into every published piece on the band. It’s what attracted their devoted following (who reportedly call themselves “the Kennel”), and landed them a record deal with Domino even before releasing their first single. Loyal to their rabid fanbase, Fat Dog let the Kennel select the initial track they recorded for Domino: a seven-minute thumper called “King of the Slugs” that came out last summer. Like most of the songs on Fat Dog’s debut album, WOOF., “King of the Slugs” is a hybrid strain of hard rock and EDM, blown-out bass and revving synths lurching into tweaked klezmer-techno. Often filtered through reverb, Love’s blunt and grizzled vocals recall bullish forebears like Idles and Fat White Family.
In April, Fat Dog played “King of the Slugs” to a packed house at Electric Brixton, a 1,500 capacity venue in South London—the same part of town that’s birthed post-punk revivalists like Shame, Dry Cleaning, and Goat Girl in recent years. Footage from the show captures the crowd pogoing in unison as Love waves a white cowboy hat over them like a rodeo preacher. Behind him, drummer John Hutchinson sweats beneath his rubber dog mask, its jaw agape and tongue spilling out the front. Much fanfare has been made of the costumes and hijinks, and the audience is going batshit—but Love seems a bit joyless and contained, like he doesn’t quite believe in the product he’s peddling. That same sense of detachment is smudged across WOOF., mucking up the surface with its dull, grayish residue.
Bemoaning rock’s cerebral turn, Love formed Fat Dog in 2021 with a batch of demos he’d made during lockdown. The band’s mandate: to make fun, ridiculous music. Something people could dance or thrash to. Hughes, Hutchinson, bassist Ben Harris, and woodwind player Morgan Wallace helped shape Love’s source material into zany bruisers with punk heft and club tempos. But despite the flatulent sax bursts and Love’s occasionally jagged howl, WOOF. feels decidedly un-fun, more like a series of cynical decisions looped on repeat.
Throughout the album, Fat Dog seem to ask: Wouldn’t it be funny if we put violin, viola, and cello on our kind-of punk album? What if we had a track with Auto-Tune, and one that name-checks the Karate Kid sequel? What if we bookend everything with moody monologues recited by our hype man, character actor Neil Bell? What if electro-polka? What if clarinet? It all carries the whiff of staged eccentricity. The songs are too long and often repeat large slabs of lyrics to no memorable effect other than filling space. For the most part, Love’s delivery feels flat, bored, and macho, making his comic verses curdle into pissy screeds, as on “Clowns”:
You are what you eat now, babyYou’re shit to meI died a thousand times now, now all I seeCrackheads to the leftAnd clowns to the rightI’m falling down the stairsNo jiggy for me tonight
Some small details capture the ruckus Fat Dog were aiming for. The thick, tendony bass on “Wither” is excellent. “All the Same” kicks off with a lubed-rubber synth line that smacks of early Nine Inch Nails. But the production often feels too trimmed and clean. The cresting strings on “I Am the King,” the pitched-up, crystalline backing vocals on “Clown,” and Love’s largely scuff-free voice don’t suit the material or capture the alleged force of Fat Dog’s live act.
“When you’re releasing stuff to a big audience, the best you can hope for is that 50% of people love it and 50% of people hate it,” Chris Hughes said in an interview with DIY last year, his face coated in gold paint. “If people just have a lukewarm response then what’s the point?” Unfortunately, Fat Dog’s debut slumps right in that tepid puddle, weighed down by gimmicks, cheap irony, and unearned mythology. Rather than stoking rapture or rage, it prods with hollow indifference. More a whimper than a woof.
