All Dogs - Kicking Every Day

Pitchfork 76

When All Dogs' debut tape started getting noticed in summer 2013, it felt as if the Ohio four-piece, fronted by indie-rock lifer Maryn Jones, were on the crest of something. Katie Crutchfield had just released Cerulean Salt, her breakthrough second album as Waxahatchee. Northampton's Speedy Ortiz would soon release their debut, as would Wales' Joanna Gruesome, while Courtney Barnett first broke beyond Australia that August. All received some degree of international mainstream acclaim; the plainspoken, fuzzed-up frontwoman was being widely celebrated for the honesty that would likely have been dismissed as typical confessional singer-songwriter chick fare a decade, or even half a decade, earlier. While the links to forebears like Liz Phair were clear, their simply stated, often brutal honesty felt somehow new.

Two years later, as All Dogs finally release their debut album, its 40 minutes of grungy intimacy feel, in a sense, relatively commonplace, though that's good. Praising young female lyricists for the simple candor with which they confess complex emotional devastation as if they didn't expect to be heard is a trope by now, but the growing audience and respect for a woman's internal life should be relished. And even if Kicking Every Day firmly inhabits a sound and type, that doesn't mean that it has nothing new to offer. The female trainwreck is having a pop cultural moment on the big and small screen, but all too often these figures are reduced to their perceived or self-professed limitations. Jones (who is also a member of Saintseneca and plays solo as Yowler) deals with the constant mutability of experience, refusing to let a single interpretation of an event define her. It's appropriate to an age where everyone is the editor of their own life, when self-love and self-loathing go hand-in-hand online.

Back on "Love Song", from that debut 2013 tape (a split with fellow Columbus band Slouch), Jones warned a potential partner not to give her a chance because, she admitted, she'd only fuck it up, "just wait and see." Across Kicking, she confesses to being driven by anxiety and self-loathing, maintaining on "Skin" that "every darkness I push through/ There is a quiet familiar feeling/ And in it I am always waiting for everything to fall/ Just like I always make it so." "That Kind of Girl" starts with her mid-sentence, aware that she's as destructive a force in someone else's life as she always imagines herself to be. But the minute some unknown third party warns her lover off "messing with that kind of girl," she starts burning with rage, demanding transparency and explanation over a fiery squall and bass that drones and sparks like an anchor towed down a gravel road. On paper, Jones' lyrics can scan a little sad-sack; on record, she delivers them with the joyous belligerence that befits a band who often sound like early 2000s Guided by Voices, all mid-fi production, hectic drums, and fuzzy power chords hewing euphoric hooks. They play arena-sized in basement studios, their reach infectious.

Jones spends much of Kicking bristling against her own limitations as well, aware of the way her self-defeating impulses play into depression's toxic loop. "I will find a way to justify my pain," she sings on "Skin", and asks any friend that finds her on the floor to check if she's alright, but not to tell her otherwise on "Sunday Morning", a Lemonheads/Sundays-y bundle where she's caught adrift in the routine-less routine of touring. "How Long" is a triumphant-sounding portrait of self-loathing where she gives the Joan Didion edict about staying on good terms with your past selves a nightmarish inversion: "All these people that I've been hold knives." Her lacerating lyrics offer the potential for deadening recognition, but also empathy. "Your Mistakes" has a softer touch, as if Sharon Van Etten had started releasing records as a drunk 19 year old in a garage, and offers a friend comfort for the way that enduring regrets tend to obliterate the mind. Jones makes shame corporeal and emptiness vast, giving these songs gut-punching impact beyond the lingering melodies.

split tape w/slouch and November 2013's 7” both saw All Dogs moving at breakneck speed, stretching out power-pop with fiery yearning. Towards the end of Kicking especially, things take a calmer, darker, turn, the drums often fading away. The stillness suits them. Standout "Leading Me Back to You" has the tainted romance of American Football or Mineral; before the defiant chorus kicks in, "Skin" could be a relic from 1990s Louisville, and the warm hiss of "The Garden" suggests that it's Jones' original demo. It's a softly strummed plea for someone to hold tight, because parts of her are going to disappear by the time she returns from some sojourn—not through collapsing in on herself as in opener "Black Hole", but by heeding the warning she set out in the careening "Flowers": that you'll never find satisfaction "if all that you grow are gardens of longing for things you don't know." Kicking Every Day spends a lot of time trawling the murk, but recognizes that, ultimately, it's down to the individual to dig herself out; it's a warm thump of encouragement from an equally grubby hand.