Album Review: Not Your Dog!

Mild mannered billionaire journalist (citation needed) 17-year-old Christchurch musician by day, Finlay Anderson dons the Internet Death undies by night to slap us in the ass-face with the cyber hardcore anti-hero anarchist justice of Not Your Dog!

Christchurch in 2020 is a Petri dish of physical isolation and the chaos of the entire world being beamed directly into the brains of the population potentially 24/7. It’s a great combination of feeling zero power but being aware of 100 existential problems. If you are, or have ever been a disaffected youth you might identify with the feeling of needing to put all that impotent teen-rage into some kind of outlet. That counter-culture catharsis is just the background that informs Not Your Dog! In essence it’s a game of fuck/marry/kill set to 200 bpm’s of angry dance music. As Mr Death is apparently known to say, “when it comes to tempo, minimal equals criminal.”

Released July 3rd on everyone’s favourite middle finger of a physical format, the cassette tape, the essence of the formula is 90’s EDM combined with a modern hardcore delivery. Your elevator pitch to your friends is probably going to sound something like Atari Teenage Riot, Jilted Generation era Prodigy or Ghostmane with less Xanax and more party pills.

The video to the title track and opener bleeds through a lyric video and morpheus lensed hot take into panic fueled beach run and footage of riots; all to a backdrop of concatenated lyrical flows and defiance pissed in every direction. The combination of seminal UK dance music and modern hardcore even sounds like naughties era grime sometimes, but rave culture references are littered all over the album.

Fucckk! and Will Change! sound like they could have come straight from Mindless Self Indulgence’s
Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy. Will Change! even sounds like if the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind were trying to communicate angry profanities.

Trap metal and Hip-Hop hardcore also pepper the album. Digitised melodies are done in modes associated with metal and hardcore. Songs like Suspect Nxmber Nxne! and the aforementioned Will Change! share some electronic melodic progressions with the latest Code Orange record, and Internet Death shares their affinity for grafting together semi-disparate genre ideas innovatively.

The final track Paradox! is a left turn and a nice come down to lower your heart rate and get you vibrating back on our agreed upon plane of existence. The background sample throughout is a cortex numbing, anxiety prodding stoned shower thought session waxing conspiratorial. hilariously at the end, what sounds like the voice from Radiohead’s Fitter Happier mutters “I am gonna die a fucking internet death”. What started life in OK Computer as a post-modern government sanctioned telescreen propaganda is now a post post-modern hashtag relatable meme-fodder catchphrase.

You know we’re down for the count when even the Fitter Happier guy has given up.

Not Your Dog! is aggressive, incensed, nonplussed and disrespectful. You dare to listen to it and it’ll break your ear holes with indignant rage. It’s nice to feel something electric in this cold, protracted internet death. Do we dance or mosh to this?