Animal Slaves - Dog Eat Dog


The Dog Eat Dog LP from Animal Slaves is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. This is mid 80s, New Wave-ish, bass forward, post-punky cult-rock from the Vancouver underground. Elizabeth Fischer said her singing was terrible on this album. She does sound very reminiscent of post barrell-bottom Marianne Faithfull, and this is not happy, date-night music; i'm not complaining, but you know how you like your tea, i don't. 

Interesting morbid fact, when she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2015, she raised enough money from friends and fans to visit Iceland on the way to her assisted suicide in Sweden. She tried some regular treatments first, but it became clear that she wasn't going to survive and she wanted her death to be as calm, painless, and legally/psychologically uncomplicated as possible for everyone. Reading interviews and her website you get the sense that she had a genuinely wicked sense of humor tempered by a hardcore dose of rationalism. Total Gladys in my mind. I bet she was a hoot, and that's why she had so much love and support from her whole scene. 

More than anything this little trio of albums makes me wish i could be a real label. There's something a little bit magic about holding an obscure little document of real humans doing the impossible, reaching out and connecting with complete strangers across time and space. Vinyl, the archaic, horrible, laboriously wasteful medium that it is, reminds me of just how insane that accomplishment really is in a way that CDs and our digital landfill of an internet don't. 

Listen to me, being a nostalgia bum. Enough of that mopey junk, we've got Animal Slaves' mopey junk to listen to. If you're a fan of hauntingly gloomy and morose 80s Post-Punk, but never heard of Animal Slaves, i think you'll enjoy this at least 3/4 as much as i do.

The Reactionaries

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