Dog Day
The Dog Day spirit is still there in their new LP Deformer
As husband/wife teams in music go, Nancy Urich and Seth Smith are doing just fine. So fine, in fact, that their long-running act Dog Day is made up of just the two of them these days.
“We wanted to scale back as a band and as a music business,” says Smith. “Kinda get back to the reason we started making music in the first place and keep it casual and fun.”
How did he and Urich go about this? They got the fuck out of Dodge, sequestering themselves away from, well, everything.
“A lot of bands seem to get slicker and more produced with every album. Nancy and I moved to the middle of nowhere and it was a good excuse for us to try something a little more raw and homemade. [It’s] a departure from Concentration maybe, but I think the [Dog Day] spirit is still very much there.”
Concentration, the band’s 2009 release, is a pretty good example of what Smith is referring to in terms of spirit. From its opener, “Happiness,” the album has you. An Exclaim! writer wrote that it was “both familiar and completely alien” and that’s pretty apt.
“We really kinda went out on that record,” says Smith. “We spent a long time on it writing and scheming.”
The new LP Deformer is, well, different. “Deformer’s just guitar, drums and vocals,” he says. “We basically took the smooth instruments out. I think it’s a bit more direct than previous records, less BS and more BF.”
See, this is why I like East Coasters (Dog Day is a Halifax-based act)—they lay it bare, tell it like it is. This suggests that where they are, physically, affects what they do, musically. Smith is okay with that suggestion.
“Halifax is a great melting pot for music for sure,” he says. “A lot of weirdos end up here for the art college or whatever reason and there tends to be a lot of creative stuff going on for such a small spot. There’s some great music coming out of the East Coast [scene] and since we’re kind of isolated out here a lot of it doesn’t get the exposure it deserves.”
Does he mean Dog Day? I suggest this because many (including myself) believed Concentration had an outside shot of being a dark horse contender for the Polaris Prize that eventually ended up going to Fucked Up. Not exactly.
“I think the Polaris is great, though every year there are always lots of great records that never make the long list. But I guess that’s gonna happen. It would be cool to be nominated for that type of thing but we really don’t get worked up about that kind of stuff. If people like it they like it. I don’t need a contest to tell me if my record’s any good.”
You must be logged in to leave a comment.
