Children With Dog Feet

 

picture by

Kirsten Thoen

If you've read a few of my past reviews/posts/whatever you may have noticed that Goth/Death Rock/Cold Wave and all these kinds of "dark" musics are not my cup of tea at all. I don't know much about these genres to be honest as I was never interested in listening to bands affiliated to them (which does make sense I guess). 

But let's focus on death rock for a minute, I love death-rock-infused anarcho punk bands like Rudimentary Peni or Slimy Member so a friend advised to give a try to Christian Death's early materials and I did, and no, definitely no, not my kind of brew.

But I'm still interested in death-rock infused punk, and that's why Children With Dog Feet comes now into play here. 

 

 Let's start with the end for a change, I discovered Children With Dog Feet (CWDF) with this track recently released on their bandcamp and titled Killed By Goth. As far as I know the Killed By Death compilations (which have turned into Killed By Whatever-you-want) never reached Goth territories but did nevertheless venture into Death Rock, why not after all.

Killed By Goth immediately hooked me up, it's straight forward, full of low-fi punk energy and the way the vocals sound give a great death rock vibe. And yes the reference to the "KBD genre" makes total sense as this track got some of the characteristics of the early punk tunes you could find in the first compilations (and the "intro" is an obvious reference to that of course). 

But let's rewind a little bit.

CWDF is a new band from New York City featuring four punk veterans who've played in numerous underground bands for the past decade or so. The vocalist Chi, in particular, used to sing in the death rock influenced Anasazi and performs also now in another new act, called Blu Anxxiety, that you should check out if you're into dark "avant-garde" stuff.

Whereas I'm pretty sure Blu Anxxiety is not for me I'm trying to get into Anasazi's discography and there are some songs I like but I'm still not sure what I think about the whole thing though.

But let's come back to CWDF: their first record, the Curb Your Anarchy tape, was released on Toxic State Records (great NYC label which produced a few bands you should know about) in march of this year and was an immediate success.

As I explained above I discovered the band with the very punk and straight forward Killed By Goth which could only satisfy my old hardcore punk fan's ears but the this tape's four tracks are a bit different: the tempo fluctuates between a kind of dark mid-tempo and a fastest, more punk, one and the overall atmosphere is quite gloomy. But unlike a certain clean-sounding fringe of the black-eyed scenes, CWDF sounds always messy, angry, mean and chaotic... a bit like if the noisiest scandinavian punk bands were copulating throbbingly in the basement of a London goth party if you know what I mean. 

Of course there is the slower Leatherface which develops a very gothic atmosphere before exploding without restraint in a delightful chaos but even these parts, that I might not have appreciated in other circumstances, fit very well in the whole.

In the end Children With Dog Feet delivers a very interesting mix of things I'm not used to and it works surprisingly really well for me. I've already listened to their tracks numerous times and did not grow bored of it.

I'm very curious to see what comes next!

N,J'Oi!

  You can listen to Children With Dog Feet on RAF#25

 

 

 

  

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