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Sound Advice: Dog Weather by Baby Eagle
Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.
You’ve Changed Records continues to put out some of the best current Canadian releases: from the Daniel, Fred and Julie album last winter to Daniel Romano’s (of Attack in Black and the aforementioned Daniel, Fred and Julie) Workin’ for the Music Man and the re-release of Guelph-based Richard Laviolette‘s All of Your Raw Materials this summer, the roster of collaborative projects is hard to beat. Add another Baby Eagle record to the pile, too—the (recently hiatus-ed) Constantines’ guitarist/vocalist Steve Lambke’s solo project/alter ego releases Dog Weather today, a record once again featuring a cast of contemporaries as players and a handful of weary and restless garage-folk tales that will infiltrate your life with their ragged honesty and reluctant vulnerability.
Lambke, along with his You’ve Changed co-owner Romano and their friends Shotgum Jimmie and Construction and Destruction‘s David Trenaman and Colleen Collins, make up the band for the third Baby Eagle record (past releases have included John K. Samson and Julie Doiron, to name a couple, as players). Recorded over three days in a house on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Dog Weather feels fluid, with mildly distorted guitars dancing to the beat of a country drum and harmonica on “Day of our Departing,” or serving as mere accompaniment to Lambke’s loose, candid narrative on “Dog Failure.” The record takes an awakening turn on “Crooked Coin” (streaming above) and again on “Me vs. The Devil,” going punk without losing the rootsy chord structures or drawl.
On “American Drum,” Lambke delivers a near Constantines-sounding jam, with chugging, muscular post-punk verses and acoustic, almost whispered choruses. Dog Weather is a record sure to please old Baby Eagle fans, and its homey, indie tales of worn and yearning lives, those as settled yet uneasy as these songs about them, should definitely acquire more.