Blank Dogs make the familiar unfamiliar. For instance, we have seen these elaborate PR tactics before: one man posing, at least in name, as a band, but with studiously guarded anonymity. But the web unearthed a name and pieced together a back-story, and Mike Sniper has been outed as the mastermind behind the project. A walking Wikipedia of music arcana, he played guitar in the New Jersey punk outfit D.C. Snipers, hawks rarities at the Academy Annex record shop in Williamsburg, hand-crafts gig posters and t-shirts, and set up both the power-pop-reissue label Radio Heartbeat and, more recently, the Captured Tracks imprint. His art has colonized every corner of his life. For anyone tempted to paint Sniper as a bandwagon-jumper, chasing some kind of hipper-than-thou low fidelity trend, one glance at this CV would straighten them out.
Mysterious, minimalist, alive to antecedents, Sniper's way of advertising himself mirrors his way of expressing himself. Again, there's a faint illusion of laziness. But it's the appearance of a narrow palette and recycled template-- the jog tempo, meekly mechanized drums, tin and treble, voices a room or two down the hallway-- that hides a more complicated reality. As Sniper himself told The Fader: "I have these visions sometimes of writing songs that sound like Jeff Lynne or the Move, but it still comes out sounding like some blown out Factory Records demo." But Under and Under dispatches the charge of repetition and "samey" songcraft very quickly. Track two, "L Machine", flies far off course, continents away from Robert Smith's private property, to land somewhere in Cabaret Voltaire's jungled, more treacherous terrain. While the simplicity of the album opener is preserved-- the guitar's three notes are taken over by the keyboard-- a crude, anxious vision of the future emerges. Howls of electronic static, hissing and beeping like signals intercepted by satellites, vie not only with a spirited acoustic strum, but explosions of broken glass. The startling blend suggests a close encounter of the third kind, followed by a sloshed bonfire. Another brilliant departure comes late in the record, in the aptly named "Slowing Down": the song decelerates from Under and Under's usual cruising speed, without sacrificing the project's love of disorder. Even at slower tempos, he pairs echoing guitars with slashing sounds and a chaotic hook, perhaps a decayed ode to decayed love.
Weighed against the well-received On Two Sides, released by Troubleman Limited, Blank Dogs' second full-length is more colorfully composed, without straying too far from Brooklyn's increasingly popular ragged-reverb aesthetic. Admirers of Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls, in particular, will already have a soft spot for Sniper's particular flavor of pop deconstruction. (As of 2008, you can even call them labelmates: the recent Blank Dogs EP The Fields was released by Jeremy Earl's Woodsist Records.) Where Vivian Girls sand their sharp, discordant edges with harmonies, and where Crystal Stilts shower rain over sun-kissed 1960s pop, Sniper veers off in a different direction. There's a temptation to slander these family resemblances as hipster herd thinking; given the obvious sense of community across labels like In the Red, HoZac, Art Fag, of like-spirited musicians collaborating and ideas cross-pollinating, the truth is brighter. The emotions, of course, are darker. In Under and Under, especially, today connects to yesterday through Sniper's abiding love for the overcast moods of post-punk and the gloomier regions of new wave.
The struggle to squeeze Blank Dogs into a genre is important to his project-- maybe not to the artist, but certainly to the listener: meaning can be found in each hint of music history, real or imagined. Post-punk's memorial to blighted industry is fittingly evoked here. The Blank Dogs aesthetic, and that of the larger low-fi movement, gracefully soundtracks our moment, as a kind of comment on technology's rising tide capsizing all boats. "Setting Fire to Your House" captures the present malaise, expertly pitched between menace and innocence. Like Sniper's earlier "Leaving the Light On", the song sinks a charismatic chorus into an enveloping melancholy. It is worth comparing his treated voice to a more famous manipulator. About T-Pain's reliance on Auto-Tune, The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones noted: "His vocal hooks sound delirious, not desperate." By shrouding or drowning-- the goth atmosphere demands morbid verbs-- his voice in reverb and distortion, Sniper aligns himself firmly on the side of desperation. The giddy delirium, on the other hand, is the province of the keyboards, which have the whiny timbre of a children's toy, or a campy Theremin, in the moan and sigh of solitary notes. Chords would have been too delightfully unified to capture recession-era fragment and isolation.
New wave, which came to describe the groomed and well-behaved child of punk, is no less relevant: Sniper makes use of the style's bittersweet melodies, but muddies them to oblivion, pulling them back closer to the raw emotional punch of punk. The patina of fuzz brings to mind garage rock and gauzy shoegaze (or is that fuzz really Psychedelic Fur?), while others spot goth, all suggesting amped-up arrangements of manic-depressive lyrics. Sure enough, Sniper captures the translucent train-through-fog chug of the Jesus and Mary Chain ("The New Things"), the garbled gloom of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry ("Open Shut"), and the space-age detachment of Soft Cell's Mutant Moments EP. But how can one man call to mind so many styles without sinking into incoherence? The key lies in the tunes' blurry shapelessness, the sense that we're apprehending something through squinted eyes or a Vaseline-splotched lens, and that a kind of Rorschach-blot logic of projecting and imagining takes over. Just don't ask what that something is.
