Hound Of The Underground

I reckon this review is somewhat hard on Dog Show, they were a good fun band.Pehaps their relentless merry-go-round of bleeps doesn't sit well with an old freidn in town and copious amounts of red wine. It's a pretty god read, however, I'm quite proud of this one.

DOG SHOW/THE KEYBOARD CHOIR/PAGAN WANDERER LU, Big Hair, Cellar, 2/5/09

Pagan Wanderer Lu’s songs are tiny crystallised nuggets of excellence, hand turned clusters of bleepy melody and literate lyrics so exquisite they should be sold from some impossibly cool boutique. Every tidy tune is catchy but creakily skewed, as if Stephen Merritt had been bashing fragments of song together after some violent pop holocaust. Pity that the live show isn’t too captivating, really. The vocals are a tad lifeless, and the guitar sounds clumsy and nasal amongst the quaint electronic backing, so we have to pay close attention to get the most out of the compositions. They are well worth it, though, especially the last number, a wonky Mario World bounce featuring the award winning line, “Christians like you are why God made lions”. Why aren’t there more lyricists like this around?

After the Oxford Radcliffe Hopsitals Trust, The Keyboard Choir must be this city’s primary employer. There are loads of them, and we’re not sure they’re all the same ones as last time, but they come together to buzz, fuzz, flutter and chuckle with a panoply of synths. We heartily applaud the undertaking involved in getting this huge band onstage to make keyboard noises that everyone probably assumes are all on tape anyway. The music takes in everything that’s great about electronic sound, from Messaien’s ondes martenot to microhouse, via Delia Derbyshire and Tangerine Dream, and the only part we take issue with are the rather shopworn, cliched spoken samples. They end with what sounds like something from The Orb’s forgotten Pomme Fritz LP versioned by Klaus Schulze and Sven Vath. Endearingly illogical.

What with their live drums, endlessly arpeggiating keyboards and slightly crappy flashing sculpture, Dog Show are pretty much what a band from “The Future” would look like on some low budget British sci fi show from the mid ‘70s (they wanted Roger Moore but ended up with Simon MacCorkindale; Nigel Havers puts in a good cameo, but Michael Elphick is woefully miscast). The set varies between pumping electro euphoria and a slightly annoying fairground jauntiness, until we don’t know whether stick on an Altern8 facemask or join the candy floss queue. In many ways this is like music for excitable children, on a constant sugary high and with a relentless, if somewhat gauche, melodic logic that just keeps going and going and bloody well going. Watching Dog Show is like endlessly riding the waltzer; refreshing and liberating, but you know that sooner or later you’re going to start feeling sick.