There’s a reason music reviewers utilize band names as adjectives in their reviews instead of extended metaphors, and Karmageddon is it. When reviewing a band that has as diverse a setlist as Dog, there's a certain amount of pride that comes with not being the critic who uses the phrase "An aural excavation of melting pot rock" to explain the fact that Dog's songs can only be described in terms of incongruity to one another. Of course, if that happens to be the one quote taken away from this review to put in the album’s liner notes alongside “Cor Limey, TMT,” then I’ll qualify it with a more succinct version: It sounds like a lot of different things, all together.
At times, the range of influences in David Hyman’s solo effort, Dog, pours out like a high-pressure hose trying to put out a match. Karmageddon isn’t exactly a neo-psychedelia album, nor is it a folk-rock album, nor is it dream pop. On some songs you can hear the echo of The Flaming Lips, only to be followed by a thoroughly T-Rex-infiltrated set of songs, only to be followed by spoken word, in French. Third track “Caroline” is part of a long line of songs that couple odd musical bedfellows, incorporating what sounds like the first measure of Tears For Fears’ “Head Over Heels” into an unabashed Southern-rock jam session.
Karmageddon doesn’t establish any context for itself, but it is surprisingly successful as an experiment to forgo the failures of a pop aesthetic that typically finds itself identified with terms like “radio-friendly,” “light,” or “complete tripe.” Instead, Dog crossbreeds pop sensibility with an experimental ethic, fusing sound manipulation and shuffling drum beats with an altogether 1960s Americana image. This is essentially the showcase of Hyman’s talent as a multi-instrumentalist, with the help of producer Dougie Browne (Iggy Pop, Sean Lennon, Cibo Matto, Jack Bruce, Marc Ribot). As a solo album, it’s incredibly ambitious; as an album alone, it can get a bit lost. But even when it's not sure of what kind of album it wants to be, it's intricately put together, and genuine musical ability is more than enough to even out the lack of coherence.
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