Review Summary: PUP inch closer to their Old Yeller phase – it’s the realest they’ve sounded in years.
It’s probably helpful to view PUP as victims of their own success, with 2016’s
The Dream is Over and 2019’s
Morbid Stuff laying down a combined gold standard in caustic-mouthed, technically adroit pop punk that few, including PUP themselves, have managed to lay a finger on since; it’s
definitely helpful to view frontman Stefan Babcock as a victim of his own self-loathing, neurotic complacency, and the band’s latest full-length
Who Will Look After the Dogs? depends on this sympathetic appeal like never before. From top to tail, this album sounds so heartbreakingly self-weary that its status as the fifth(!) PUP record sits like some impossible milestone rather than the single-digit happenstance it probably should be.
Hey mum, Stefan and the gang made it this far without maiming each other or breaking up and are still making meaningful music about feeling like human garbage without so much of a sniff of disingenuous maturity (yes
I made mistakes with both the Menzingers and the Wonder Years and that other one (yes
I will pay my rent next month and stop disappointing you next year I mean it)).
Needless to say, there are significant caveats. If Babcock’s acerbic lyricism peaked on
Morbid Stuff’s self-eviscerations (
I've been navigating my way / through the mind-numbing reality of a godless existence / which, at this point in my hollow and vapid life / has erased what little ambition I've got left) and nuanced character portraits (“Scorpion Hill”), then the following years have seen him grapple with the impossibility of finding anything fresh or substantive to add to the band-defining, genre-defining central truths that album let out of the bag — chief among these,
just coz you’re sad again / it doesn’t make you special at all). Say it! In the years since, Babcock has found recourse in a blend of short-snouted home truths and leering self-parody, each of which brought out the least convincing qualities of the other on 2022’s muddled
The Unraveling of PUPTheBand. The future, even by their own, characteristically dismal estimations, did not bode well.
Now,
Who Will Look After the Dogs? is far from a full turnaround in this regard: the fare here is blunt even by Babcock’s standards (
It's funny how you come around / when you're out of options / but I just don't give a shit / about your problems), and although the record’s crisply-recorded, punishingly-mixed tones are vastly preferable to the muddy tossup we heard on
PUPTheBand (credit here to jagged alt-rock veteran John Congleton, of serial production and The Paper Chase fame), they still smack of the band striving conspicuously hard to carve out a fresh sound without the full conviction of what to do with it.
Aesthetic restlessness and artless candour aside, this album’s prize quality is its apparent sincerity. No more tongue-in-cheek self-eulogies, and certainly no mawkish framing skits: these tracks see PUP write themselves out as burnouts yet again (“No Hope”), disown their youthful escapades of any glory or nostalgia (“Concrete”), sift through the repeating patterns that have soured their grapes once more (“Falling Outta Love”), weigh the consequence all this against the bleak landscape of their late 30s (the album’s defining lyric might be “Hallways”’ sobering ponderance that
Coz when one door closes / it might never open / there might be no other doors), and throw their hands in the air as if to say
WHY am I still like this (“Shut Up”).
Why indeed. If there’s one thing this band knows how to do convincingly, it’s to tread despondently upon scorched earth, and
Who Will Look After the Dogs?’ 12 tracks do exactly that so sullenly, so bitterly, with such nascent middle-aged fatigue that their emotional core rings unsettlingly true and the resultant pity trip has inspired me to make all manner of excuses for the quote-unquote finer details. The brand of scuzzy alt-rock they play here is lower tempo and lower energy than their punk rippers of yore? Band’s getting old. This is the least catchy PUP album to date despite every track practically gluing itself to a beltable chorus? Bitter truths stick louder than hooky energy. Guitar wizard Steve Sladkowski might as well be complementing these tracks with barbed wire whenever he goes off-piste (“Get Dumber”)? Believing in anything at all is tough enough; better stupid abrasive noise than the promise of empty gratification. Third single (how?) “Olive Garden” is an unbearable earsore and comfortably the worst track the band has ever released? Well… even this album’s all-devouring doom spiral can't claim a current strong enough to sweep that one away, but it's certainly got enough momentum behind it that I've found myself wanting to
want to like these songs (and, eventually, moderately, pathetically mostly succeeding).
If it's not obvious enough at this point,
Who Will Look After the Dogs? is a
long way from a perfect record, but this is no obstacle to respecting it on its own terms — as a sadsack burnout trip from a band that has lost sight of almost all its past brilliance and knows it, but still has enough dignity to own its scrappy qualities for what they are, rather than inadvertently collapsing into them (
The Unraveling of PUPTheBand) and/or self-consciously hawking them (per
The Unravelling of PUPThegoddamned
BAND). Few records pull off
kinda sucks anything near as endearingly as this one does, and if that mode of PUP isn't enough for you, then just be grateful they still know how to make an album I fucking guess.
