by Tobias Baughan
Oxfordshire musician Willie J Healey’s debut, People and their Dogs is an album to get excited about. It’s also an album title which gives dogs a break in the music industry, a whole area of culture in which they rarely feature.
Track 1: Subterraneans is a mellow starter, spacey swirls of guitar floating by like UFOs, building to a conclusion at frantic heights. This sets the tone as well as any for the album’s themes of suburbia, otherworldliness and desperation. A vision, though recognisable from films such as Blue Velvet and American Beauty, which is more indebted in outlook to Napolean Dynamite, in its assertion of catharsis through arts and performance.
The overall aesthetic that guides the album allows it to continue to draw in different galactic flotsam into its gravitational pull, grooving through My Room and Somewhere in Between. The latter feeling like an accurate description of where we are now hovering amidst the familiar (suburbia) and the indefinable experience of someone not happy, not sad, but ‘somewhere in between both’. There’s also some sweet Thin White Duke era Bowie sax here.
Track 4, the head bopping All Those Things (possibly the album’s closest nod to Mac Demarco) begins with the incantation to dream dream amongst its off kilter bass and keys, floating off into sharp stabs of riff and an eventual, rainy drench of cymbals. Whether the subject of this song or its protagonist is a dog is never specified.
At this point the album gets punchier on tracks Love Her, Would You Be, the Neal Unger inspired Pipedreams and Greys. A series of songs along with the two that follow which make up the album’s dramatic peak. Here we continue to flit between suburban alter egos and outsiders of the sort who may not usually find themselves committed to song, nor able to find much of a narrative themselves, the sort of dreamers that would be happy to sign up for a few days alien abduction if only to break up the next few weeks shifts in that temp job on the industrial estate.
This is fun to listen to while I stick my face out the window and let the wind twack my doggy chops at super high space G FORCE.
Next up it’s People and Their Dogs, where jagged riffs, stoppy starty bits and breaks build up into one of the albums prominent instrumental breaks, complete with guitar solo. A worthy title track for the era of doggy day care.
Lazy Shade of Pink takes us a long way from A Whiter Shade of Pale. This number bops along nicely somewhere between the worlds of John Paul Sartre and Paul McCartney, before collapsing and rebuilding through a drum solo to another top peak. Despite having specially flown a gong in from Germany for one infamous gig this isn’t included on the album version, leading me to affectionately enquire what’s gong wrong?
Marie’s Balcony and We Should Hang feel like a friendly nod back to the Hey Big Moon EP, with their comparatively low key feel, and quieter timbres. A friendly exit from a new band who may be the biggest to emerge from the hindquarters of Ox and Berks since the wonderful XTC.
It’s a good thing however that Willie J Healey’s family were content to let their son try his hand at music. If only to give us all, dogs and humans alike, that blissful reminder of just how normal strange is, and what a wonderful thing escapism can be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSYPrlTB2w4