Carnival of Soul

“I haven’t felt like this since 1995,” Anna Waronker sings on the new album by That Dog., and maybe she’s taking just a few years of poetic license. “Old LP” is actually the first album by That Dog. since 1997, reconvening three of the four band members that released “Retreat From the Sun” 22 years ago, just months before announcing the group’s dissolution.

That Dog. arrived during the 1990s upsurge of indie and/or alternative rock; it carried a music-business pedigree. Waronker’s father is Lenny Waronker, the producer who became president of Warner Bros. Records and co-chair of DreamWorks Records; Rachel Haden and Petra Haden, who were both in the 1990s lineup of the band, are daughters of the renowned jazz bassist Charlie Haden. Tony Maxwell, on drums, completed the band.

Back in the 1990s, Anna Waronker was in her 20s, writing and singing about youthful infatuations, hopes, annoyances and prerogatives — sometimes passionately, sometimes playfully. On its three 1990s albums, That Dog.’s music craftily seesawed between punky and pretty: intricate vocal harmonies and violin lines one moment, bristling grunge guitar chords the next.

That Dog. found it still had fans when it revisited its songs with a handful of reunion shows in 2011 and 2012. While Petra Haden — who has been recording prolifically in various projects through the years — chose not to rejoin the revived band, the new album has been in the works since at least 2016, when the group posted it as a Kickstarter project.

The grown-up That Dog. isn’t so blithe or flippant anymore, and it looks back as much as it looks forward. “Old LP,” the album’s lushly orchestrated title song and finale, confronts mortality in a musical family, hearing the voice of a departed loved one on an “old LP” (not even a stream): “I can hear you breathe/I can see you right in front of me.”

In other songs, Waronker delves into long-term relationships: mostly precarious ones, rooted in old betrayals and increasingly unsustainable compromises. “I tried and tried and tried to pretend/But the dissonance will win in the end,” she sings in “When We Were Young,” as her words collide with an upbeat, handclapping folk-rock arrangement. “Alone Again,” a bittersweet, string-laden waltz, bluntly begins, “Broken hearted/Finish what you started.” But near the end of the album, “Least I Could Do” strives toward reconciliation: “We’ve come too far just to run from the hardest parts,” she vows.

During the 1990s, That Dog.’s music was contemporary with Liz Phair, the Breeders, Throwing Muses and Belly. A generation later, when rock has been sidelined from the current pop mainstream, That Dog. reaches back through a much wider swath of pop history, all the way to girl groups and Hollywood soundstage orchestras. (Petra Haden played violin in the 1990s That Dog.; now, Waronker’s arrangements often deploy phalanxes of overdubbed cellos and violins.)

Image

“If You Just Didn’t Do It,” juxtaposes string-topped baroque pop with grunge distortion as it confronts someone’s destructive habit: “I’m writing this song because I can’t talk to you,” it begins. And the furious guitar riffing of “Down Without a Fight” strives to merge the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” and the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” while the lyrics update Lesley Gore: “You don’t own me/but you owe me.”

On “Old LP,” That Dog. doesn’t pretend that time hasn’t passed between albums. Fashions and poses matter far less; irreversible choices have been made. The music is denser and more intricate, conjuring symphonic grandeur alongside overdriven noise. The jokes are gone; the stakes feel higher. But the band’s underlying moxie hasn’t changed. “Your Machine” starts the album with a chord progression out of doo-wop and a reverb-heavy guitar that crescendos to a multitracked blast: “I hope you know where I’ve been,” Waronker sings. “How much I want to show you/What I can bring/And why I won’t give in.”

That Dog.
“Old LP”
(UMe)