A very good album title, as The English Dogs are very much a band with two heads, with two different versions of them out there. Forming as a punk band in the early 80’s and playing with the likes of Discharge and GBH they started incorporating a more metallic influence on bringing Gizz Butt into the line-up after their debut album ‘Invasion Of The Porky Men.’ To cut a very long story short after various break up’s, reformations etc there are in essence now two bands playing under the English Dogs moniker. Just to add to the confusion one version led by first line up vocalist Pete Wakey Wakefield have recently released an album ‘We did we do we always fucking will!’ a statement in itself and the other band with Gizz Butt and first line up drummer Andrew Pinch Pinching have after a 2012 tour of the USA decided to release this their first English Dogs album in two decades. This is very much considered the crossover band with a lot of metal to their sound compared to the more punk orientated other mob. Yep it’s kind of enough to make your head spin and quite honestly when this sort of divisible split happens within a band and they both end up using the same name it never goes completely well for either party.
Personally neither version of the band really hit my radar over time, if it had it would have probably been the more punk lot but they were pretty much in flux and I never seemed to catch them on a live bill. I went into The Thing… with a completely open mind but quickly found myself struggling with it and trying desperately to think of something good to say about the album.
I guess one of the main problems was trying to appreciate the nasal tones of singer Ade Bailey but I just find them grating. Then there’s the music it just sounds like cast off riffs from a playing by numbers band giving appreciation to old songs bridging all the likely gaps from Metallica to Slayer. ‘Turn Away From The Light’ sounds clumsy and almost tripping over itself and I am already really having problems on the first number here. Having persevered and now listened to the album quite a few times unfortunately my opinion has not changed at all. I guess what I was hoping for here was something like the sound of the sadly missed Grip Inc rather than silly pastiche numbers like ‘Freak Boy’ where it’s not just the music but the dire lyrics making me really cringe. I quite like the guitar melody at the start of Gorgonized unfortunately it sounds like it’s straight out an Arch Enemy song and it’s really difficult to find anything particularly original here. As for Hate Song, well I appreciate that drummer Pinch is in The Damned (another band with a fair amount of line up upheavals) but changing the lyrics to their classic Love Song to suit a clichéd and dire metal song is heresy as far as I am concerned. He may play the original on stage all the time but it’s not like he wrote it and if I had got this on physical media I think on hearing it I would definitely have been very quick to smash it up.
I do like Up From The Depths as it’s just a quiet pirate shanty interlude sounding like it could even be sampled from a film. At least it gives my ears a bit of a rest before we get back into the thrash and galloping pace ‘The Thing Will Arise which even has a power croon in it as it rehashes Anthrax career by numbers. ‘Planet Of The Living Dead’ is a cheesy B-Movie thrash a long with gang shouting whoa’s boosting it along. I like cheesy B movies with titles like this but watching them is generally an endurance test as is listening to this. The nadir of awfulness comes on ‘Royal Flying Corpse’ though which has the worst and most annoying chorus I can remember hearing in years. It comes across like an incredibly bad cheese laden nightmare with ideas nabbed from Stuka Squadron.
Best thing I can say really about this album is that it’s short; well it is until the last track ‘Down With The Underdogs’ is left to give me a final ten minutes nashing teeth and wringing my hands together in pain. It’s obvious that I won’t be listening to this again in a hurry (read ever) but I hope that the album does find an audience out there who appreciates it; for me though it’s a tried and tested exercise of everything I hate about metal.
(3/10 Pete Woods)
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