Bandbandband - dogbanddog

The debut album from dogbanddog, a folky offshoot of Manchester’s catbandcat, is called Bandbandband.

It’s greatgreatgreat.

Bandbandband is a collection of songs about everyday life, orchestrated with alternately mega-grand and tiny-intimate instrumentals. The lyrics remind me of Richard Dawson’s precise and funny observations in albums like 2020 and last year’s End of the Middle. It's full of great little lines about work, love, life and school – written in a charming, familiar voice. The band also share Dawson’s musical knack for perfect little imperfections. Across the album, guitar twangs, unusual percussion, field recordings & other inexplicable background rattles give a lived-in texture to the space around the songs. The songs are allowed to grow out of, and then back into this surrounding space: often beginning with disparate strums and strikes, before building into an emphatic chorus.

I love albums like this, with scrappy hairy edges, texture, LIFE! Albums which sound like homemade & jumbled up scrapbooks of love poems and photographs.

A standout song on Bandbandband is ‘New York City’. It’s a sweeping, glittering waltz, which narrates a series of imagined futures with a partner. The song’s scope encompasses whole cities, but it’s really about small things: morning coffee, trips to bankside galleries, photographs and sketchbooks. At times the sound of the band grows massive & heroic, full of adventurous spirit as the lyrics imagine travelling the world with a lover, but eventually the song descends into softer pastoral tones – as singer Michael Cottom imagines a quiet country life with a happy family, and delivers a sweetly devastating passage:

‘When you die I’ll show these songs to your daughters
And when they cry I’ll say “No don’t be stupid,
You should dance and whirl,
‘Cause the music’s happy”
And when they ask, “who am I to tell them?”
I’ll say “well, I was happy when we wrote it.”

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Another highlight is ‘Exams’, where the brutal self-flaggelating inner narrative of an underprepared student (‘It’s three weeks ‘till exams today / and I am fucked in every way’) is matched by a soft & sympathetic instrumental, which makes the anxious teenage melodrama feel quaint and cute. Not in a mocking way, but like looking back on things which felt like the end of the world at the time, and actually ended up basically fine. It's a gorgeous and nostalgic piece of music, which swells and swells until it collapses in on itself, and the band rememerge with a brilliantly ramshackle rendition of a half-remembered lullaby. Elsewhere, ‘Cycling 2’ moves from a jazzy John-Martyn-like cruise to a primeval accordion dirge, while the lyrics describe riding a bike with no hands and feeling ‘a bit like a dickhead’.

At points in the album, dogbanddog take a mischievous approach to instrumentation & subject matter - developing beautifully odd song structures, or interesting & ironising juxtapositions between sounds and lyrics. But at other times, they're equally capable of working in a more earnest and conventional mode – creating properly moving passages of music which make my heart soar. It's an album with thrilling sonic, lyrical, and emotional range, and something I expect to return to & cherish many times this year (especially 'New York City', what a lovely song).

Thank you to Matt Deakin for putting me on xx