Earth Dog – Music for Paranoid Cartoons

“Music For Everyone:” the sticker on the cover of Earth Dog’s latest album, Music for Paranoid Cartoons, is inviting, contrasting the gray and black bird striking for prey. Earth Dog’s beats are unrelenting throughout the album, but their delivery is often interrupted or enhanced by singular moments — a stark, dry key, a filter, or clanging, resonating sounds. Beyond this friendly invitation, Earth Dog presents electronic hunts that seize rhythmic mutilations. The themes throughout Paranoid Cartoons run deeper than that childlike suggestion, for Earth Dog’s tones can be more bleak than animated, or surprisingly detailed despite a simple approach. Earth Dog uses a small number of elements of create series of beats and key strikes, which emphasizes the album’s pacing and stuttering.

“Beak” might be the best example of this successful, minimal approach. A stop/start, repetitive melody on keys is joined by a heavy backbone that offsets the opening rhythm. Both parts drop out, leading to lone key parts that are bright and alien, contrasted and trading lines with bellowing synthetic riffs. Sustaining toward the close of the song, the elements overcome their pesky rhythms and air out the density of the track. Along these themes of rhythm and resolution, Music for Paranoid Cartoons is a surprising electronic set. Cassettes are gone but you can download the album for free now via Earth Dog’s Bandcamp.