For this Monday’s FACT mix, we’ve finally got Blank Dogs on the buttons.
One of our favourite artists operating today, Blank Dogs is based in New York, and runs the Captured Tracks label, where he releases work by Woods, Dum Dum Girls and much more along with his own material. He also releases frequently on other labels, such as In the Red, and makes up one half of the Mayfair Set with Dum Dum Girls’ Dee Dee.
Blank Dogs’ music is classic alt-rock – it’s frequently described as lo-fi, but although his songs bear an obvious debt to cassette culture, it also owes something to the cleaner, radio-friendly but uncompromising punk of The Cure and Joy Division. Indeed, his new EP for Captured Tracks, Phrases, features some of Blank Dogs’ cleanest work to date.
Until last year, when he started playing live, Blank Dogs kept his identity anonymous, with press shots finding him wrapped in gauze and draped in sheets. He quit that when, in his own words from a future in-depth FACT interview, it started to distract from the music, and people started to assume that “the anonymity was a scam to sell records or whatever.”
His FACT mix is a collection of “current things [Dogs] has kept in rotation instead of old favourites”. We haven’t heard most of it before, and we’d wager you haven’t either – all the more reason to dig in. Tracklist, along with words from Blank Dogs on the tracks featured, can all be found over the page.
(Available for seven days)
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