Screeching Weasel – Bark Like A Dog – Review

Screeching Weasel

Bark Like A Dog (Fat)
by Scott Hefflon

That’s right, they’re back and they’re on Fat. The short version of the autobiography (written by Ben, natch) doesn’t even mention Lookout!, but it doesn’t mention an awful lot of other semi-pertinent info either. Ben can finally call himself Ben Weasel again without sounding like he’s subsisting on past infamy alone. Er, scratch that. Now he has a somewhat valid excuse for calling himself Ben Weasel again. For those of you who haven’t started ‘zines in order to get every crappy CD that comes out (I think there’re still a few of you left), allow me to quote from the bio (that’s the hype-ridden letter, sometimes as thick as a term paper and about as interesting, that comes with every CD which blatantly begs what pass for journalists in this day and age to review the accompanying waste of natural resources in the tree-killing, money-wasting hobby you call a ‘zine): “Pushing thirty, we realized we simply had to prove that we could still keep pace with today’s hurly-burly world of punk rock. We had to show those crazy youngsters with their backwards baseball caps and Internet computer programs that we still knew how to bop to the atomic beat. We had to suck in our guts, carefully comb our hair weaves and toss our collective hat back into the pop-punk ring. We had to keep paying the rent.”

Whether you like, love, or hate Ben and whoever happens to be in Screeching Weasel at the moment, if anyone that is, you kinda have to have some opinion on the matter. (Er, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, perhaps you ought to think about getting out a little more often.) Based on the premise that this album was made merely to prove they could, and make a bundle doing it, and tell everyone that’s why they were doing it, and still get away with it, hell, they get points for audacity if nothing else. But is the album any good? Debatable. Convince one of your uncool friends that it’ll make ’em cool if they buy it, then listen to their copy and judge for yourself. Bark Like A Dog has many of the same elements that made Screeching Weasel great in the first place. It bops, it sneers, it snarls, there are lots of “whoa-whoa”s and “whoa-ah-oh”s, and Ben alternates between not really liking anything and really liking some girl or other. The vocals often slide into apathetic, “Yeah, so this is the next verse. I’m only doing this ’cause I have to, you understand.” At other times, Ben rips out the lyrics like he did in days of old. Whether he meant them even then is, again, debatable, but it’s a different debate. Some of it sounds forced, much of it seems to be calculated and, ya know, deliberate, and, in its entirety, it’s rather like milking an old cow just to prove it’ll still produce milk. The same milk it produced years ago. (Homogeneous reference to be inserted at the reader’s (in)discretion.) Yeah, but is it good? Well, yeah, didn’t I say that? It’s OK. The old CDs are more vital, more a part of something that was going on at the time. At least, it seemed that way at the time. Perhaps Bark Like A Dog is an integral part of what’s going on right now. What is going on right now, anyway? To question the validity of Screeching Weasel in 1997 is to question where “we’re” at right now, and that ain’t something I can help you with. So fuck off.