While the word “melee” would have been truth-in-advertising for the riotous post-hardcore battle royale of Dogleg’s debut album, it’s actually an homage to Super Smash Bros.—a video game as essential to their live show as frontman Alex Stoitsiadis’ onstage cartwheels. The Detroit, Michigan quartet offers free swag to anyone who can beat bassist Chase Macisnki on the Nintendo 64 emulator at their merch table and they haven’t lost a T-shirt yet. Despite their overt gaming references on the album to Pokemon and Star Fox, Dogleg aren’t interested in fantasy or world-building, just the sheer, rejuvenating physical pleasure of controlling a lifelike version of yourself capable of jumping higher, punching faster, and sustaining more damage than any human could.
Though still self-produced and recorded in Stoitsiadis’ house, Melee levels up like Dogleg are clutching some kind of glowing orb that allows them to jump the gap between their rowdy live shows and 2015’s scrappy Remember Alderaan? EP. Dogleg guarantee hyperbolic energy, whether playing in front of a dozen onlookers in an unfamiliar DIY space or the jubilant hometown crowd at Bled Fest captured in the video for the atomic shout-along “Fox.” It’s a testament to their unwavering vitality that “Fox” isn’t an outlier, but surrounded by equally anthemic instances of fighting anxiety with more anxiety.
There are still hints of the gateway bands that served as Dogleg’s early influences. “Wrist” does breakneck jumping jacks until Milwaukee’s Best sweats through its pores, as if the Strokes had spent their late teens in University of Michigan’s Metal Frat instead of a Swiss boarding school. As with most rock music that sounds truly youthful, Melee doesn’t invent new forms so much as connect bands once separated by subtle genre classification. The Gen-Z members of Dogleg use Melee as a synopsis of guitar music made in their short lifetime from bands whose aggression appeared completely at odds with prevailing tastes. In their sound are bands like …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and At the Drive In who served as the violent wing of the New Rock Revolution; Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory and Japandroids’ Celebration Rock’s referendum on chillwave; an entire decade of Midwestern emo raging against cosmopolitan lifestyle-indie. Melee effectively advocates for a binary of taste: There is rock music that slaps and rock music that does not, the latter of which should not be given any attention.
Melee was more or less complete when Dogleg signed to Triple Crown in early 2019, and in the time since, they’ve tinkered with the mix only to settle on the most obvious production aesthetic: loud and, if possible, slightly louder. From the first engine-revving, “buckle up, motherfucker” riff of “Kawasaki Backflip,” Dogleg are fueled by the perpetually brick-walled waveform, whether through blunt force, sidelong strikes, or the kind of precise combinations of both that make them so formidable at Super Smash Bros. “Kawasaki Backflip” and “Hotlines” live in the exhilaratingly small space between floating and faceplanting. The vocal and guitar melodies chase each other across “Bueno” and “Wartortle,” as Stoitsiadis turns a harsh, melodic bark into an atonal scream every time the band tries to shake him off the trail. “Fox” ends in a full sprint, and after a brief snippet of laughter, “Headfirst” spends its duration somersaulting downhill, the thrill of victory and agony of defeat as one.
While many of Melee’s thrills are similar to contact sports, Dogleg’s decision-making process is painstaking and considered, even if it mostly amounts to “play fast.” The blinkered dedication to velocity becomes an asset. For all of its immediate, point-and-shout, crowd-surfing appeal, the most impactful moments on “Fox” are an ankle-breaking hitch of a drum fill and a bass solo leading up to Stoitsiadis’ triumphant guitar-whee. In the video for “Kawasaki Backflip,” Dogleg break shit alone in a garage until Stoitsiadis takes a sledgehammer to his reflection during the rhythm section’s climactic slam on the brakes.
Melee is filled with similarly counterintuitive hooks: put the beery group vocals at the front of the song, save the strings and horns for the loudest tracks, avoid the mid-album ballad and put the nastiest songs there instead. There are no quiet parts, no calm, no pauses for a group hug, even if there are 13 credited backup vocalists. In the rare moments when there’s any bit of space, someone in the band is still screaming off-mic before plunging back into the fray.
There is no doubt that Melee is emo as hell—Stoitsiadis begins and ends the album lying on the floor in a state of abject depression, framing the choice of fighting back or giving up as the same kind of elemental, apocalyptic ultimatum that echoes through “Born to Run,” “A Praise Chorus,” and “Fire’s Highway.” But spiritually, it’s aligned with subgenres like crunk and happy hardcore, where the lyrics mostly function as prompts for its ultimate goal of sublimating pent-up aggression into physical liberation. If Dogleg’s scope is limited, it’s only in the service of blocking out anything that stands in the way of a singular, superhuman ambition to buck all assumptions about what an ambitious rock album is supposed to do in 2020. Dogleg aspires to nothing short of breaking the first law of thermodynamics: creating energy where none previously existed.
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