Dog Eat Dog Re-Deux LP
The three women of DOG EAT DOG were visual artists living and working in New York’s East Village in the early ’80s, and after watching many of their peers in the city’s downtown scene form bands without much (or any) formal training in music, they decided to pick up drums, bass, and a sax in order to start their own project, learning as they went along. The loose and spacious funk-informed grooves that they landed on were the sort of thing that would have been a natural fit alongside LIQUID LIQUID and BUSH TETRAS on 99 Records, but DOG EAT DOG never actually managed to release anything during their short run—ten live tracks and a lone studio cut surfaced for the first time on a posthumous (and now very spendy) 2011 collection; Re-Deux makes all of that material available once again with the addition of two newly unearthed live recordings. The vocals are sparse and enigmatic, almost like playground chants, and they function more as a rhythmic element than any sort of narrative anchor, in tandem with equally minimalist, cyclical bass lines and rattling percussion (drum kit plus woodblock, cowbell, bongos, shakers, you name it). That stripped-down, rhythm-forward mentality makes ESG an easy parallel, or PULSALLAMA for a less obvious reference, except DOG EAT DOG’s approach wasn’t nearly as taut and urgent, leaning into playful, spirited amateurism in a very no wave-informed way that was closer to Y PANTS, if anything—the real femme-punk freak sound.