I Like Big Mutts!

One of two reviews in the latest Nightshift, this is the review of the famous band (or famous enough to fill Oxford's largest venue, anyway...my mum's not heard of them).

FAT DOG/ ZIPLOCK, O2, 16/2/25 

With two sets of bright ravey keyboards, sprightly drums, and inscrutable, deadpan vocals Ziplock probably shouldn’t be funky, but they deliver a slice of Happy Meal electro bounce-pop which is part ESG, part EMF, and part whatever sounds good on an E. Halfway through the set they swap the Hoover synth lines for a thicker buzzing bass clomp and couple it with some surprisingly intricate and tricksy drum patterns until they sound rather wonderfully like Add N To (X) doused in cherry cola.  

They share members with Fat Dog, but in the thirty minutes between sets any desire for concepts like delicacy and elegance are presumably scoured out of them in some  backstage ritual, possibly involving dogs' heads and Tennent’s Extra. Their dance-punk attack is far more intense on stage than on record, Joe Love’s vocals rarely dropping below a nasal bellow, and the pounding gabber-adjacent electronic pulses often drowning out the live drums. The sound is elementary and elemental, not so much broad strokes as hard slaps. And it certainly galvanises the crowd to frenzied moshing within four bars flat. On the downside, the fiddle and sax are almost entirely inaudible for the whole gig, and a tendency to smother the vocals in unchanging delay turns the gig into a giant enveloping thump-hum, like being harangued by a totalitarian DustBuster. As non-stop pummelling goes, though, it’s all good clean (dirty) fun, and a larger stage than their last Oxford visit has not leeched the infectious energy from the band. 

There’s a clear line to be drawn back to the sleaze rock of Fat White Family – or more accurately, their chunkier sick-sequin spin-off Moonlandingz – but in some ways Fat Dog are more like a diseased glam version of Laibach, all joke jackboots and coked-up EBM, spiced with the controlled chaos antics of Gogol Bordello. What they lose in depth tonight they gain in potency, and if we long for some of the Ziplock quirkiness to vary the tone a little, the majority of a teeming Academy clearly couldn’t disagree more, howling along with every word, leaping like loons and hollering appreciation at every possible juncture: fair play, nothing wrong with a night of hedonistic noise (but do stop doing that woof-woof chant, you sound like the audience on The Word, and that runny dollop of lad culture is best left in the 90s).