Dogs show they're a different breed
Dogs Die In Hot Cars/Phoenix/Longview
Paradise, Boston, Massachusetts
April 4, 2005
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, April 6, 2005

That Dogs Die In Hot Cars sounds like XTC is almost indisputable by now – type the two band names into Google and you’ll get tens of thousands of hits. It’s not just the uncanny resemblance between the voices of Craig Macintosh and Andy Partridge; the similarities seep so deeply into both the sound and structure of the quirky songs on the band’s debut Please Describe Yourself (V2) that an entirely plausible theory could be put forth that Dogs Die In Hot Cars, like the Dukes Of The Stratosphear and the Three Wise Men, is simply XTC in disguise.

They are indeed separate bands, though, as Monday night’s show at the Paradise demonstrated in two different ways. For one thing, the Glasgow band embraced live performance, something Partridge’s stagefright quickly nixed for his group. Macintosh, whose singing also contained strong echoes of second- and third-tier 1980s British bands like the Icicle Works, Haircut 100 and When In Rome, was an enthusiastic frontman who was comfortable enough to be left alone on stage with an acoustic guitar for a Billy Bragg-like number in the middle of the set.

And for another, Dogs Die In Hot Cars was no XTC. While the best songs – like the hooky, ska-inflected “I Love You ‘Cause I Have To” and “Somewhat Off The Way,” with its catchy but wordless vocal refrain resolving into a stomping, lockstep rhythm – were the simplest, the rest were twisty affairs that sometimes seemed too precious for their own good. Macintosh did most of the heavy lifting; keyboardist Ruth Quigley and guitarist Gary Smith contributed harmonies reminiscent of the Crash Test Dummies, but with the exception of a brief but brilliant solo in “Godhopping,” Smith stayed in the background, while Quigley’s energetic presence was hampered by being relegated to the back of the stage and way off to the side.

Regardless, the audience was appreciative, though the crowd thinned out dramatically after Phoenix finished its set. Hailing from Paris, the band was hard to pin down stylistically; they drew from a wide array of different sources – including synth pop, psychedelia, jam bands, Talking Heads-style funk and others – without really sounding like any of them. That elusiveness could have proven deadly, but the band settled into a devastating confidence a few songs in, at one point simply grooving on a single chord to the accompaniment of the crowd’s handclaps.

The show was opened by Manchester, England’s Longview, whose echoey, textural guitar pop recalled the Church and Sigur Rós, or “Champagne Supernova” without the hooks or drama.

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