Song(s) of the Day # 1,538 Hop Along

Being original is necessarily a concern for any guitar band wanting to put out music in 2018. Sixty years plus down the road pretty much everything has been done before in some shape or form. Philadelphia's Hop Along seem to realise this. Their approach to this conundrum often seems to be to start each song in the middle of nowhere rather than conforming to conventional expectations of song structure such as guitar intro, verse, stroke, verse, chorus and so on.

This approach tends to harvest somewhat mixed results on their third album Bark Your Head Off, Dog, just out. Undoubtedly led, by singer Frances Quinlan's questing, wayward vocals, each song heads off on a trip into some kind of unknown like a set of journeys without maps. As their audience you can't help but admire their sense of adventure even if you sometimes wonder where exactly they are trying to take you. By the end of each of these small treks you're often none the wiser and are left puzzling whether you'll ever get to know these songs even on repeated listenings, so determined are the band to avoid conventional terrain.

So I was left puzzled by my first encounter with Bark Your Head Off, Dog. By the end of it I couldn't really pick out a favourite song as each of the nine available followed a similar, apparently plotless route. Though melody is definitely a preoccupation here it's melody of the sort that Mary Margaret O'Hara used to favour, so we're left to watch a band set on determining their own time and space rather than doing things the way for example The Beatles suggested, for most of their recording career anyhow, (if you don't count the likes of Revolution 9).

Whether I'll return to the album on a regular basis, I'm not sure. I was looking forward to hearing the record but said my farewells to it after the first run through with somewhat mixed feelings. I admired the bands resolve without having a clear idea of what exactly they were setting out to do. Only time will tell whether it unwraps gifts to the listener over time that aren't immediately apparent. I'll have to get back to you on that one.