Dogstar
Our Little Visionary

In my review of Dogstar's debut EP, I emphasized how the presence of a movie star in the lineup had misled media and audiences, turning an authentic and credible trio into yet another Hollywood star's whim. And credibility and authenticity are still what resonate at the end of listening to this debut in long format.

The band of Bret Domrose, disguised as Keanu Reeves' band, plays a radio-friendly grunge-postgrunge ("Forgive", "Honesty Anyway", "Goodbye"), sagacious ("Nobody Home", "Bleeding Soul" with its empty-full-empty guitar riffs), powerful ("Enchanted", the closing "Denial") and even light in tracks like "Breathe Tonight" and the title track.

They offer a juicy version of Badfinger's "No Matter What", which is as pleasant as it is unconventional, and they throw in a couple of straightforward American music pieces... Listen to "And I Pray", perhaps imagining it played by Soul Asylum... They would have added an acoustic guitar to soften and tie everything together, and David Pirner would have sung it with his unmistakable raspy voice, among a thousand arpeggios.

Not an unpredictable band, not an eclectic band perhaps, but solid, effective, valid, robust, and with a handful of quite good songs. For those who loved grunge, I'm sure that listening to "My Little Visionary" will be worth more than this paragraph summarizes. Much more will be worth for those who feel a bit nostalgic for grunge and those years. A record that might even surprise those who believed they had more or less heard and known everything about that music genre...

But I don't blame anyone: who would have expected good music from yet another musical whim of a Hollywood movie star?