'Why Dogs Howl At the Moon' (2007) Some Reviews

(see also "Audio Addiction" and "Full Moon Over Wowtown" reviews pages)

****
"New Yorker Thomas Truax doesn't just walk the oddball walk; he runs, skips, jumps and pirouettes it. New album Why Dogs Howl At The Moon is the aural actualisation of this lunatic character's skewed approach to song-structuring. A Tim Burton styled visionary, Truax and his self-assembled Hornicator... gnarl through the eerie Waits-esque remonstrations of Escape From New York and Like a Fallen Tree. If verse-chorus-verse conformity is what you crave, then Why Dogs Howl will disappoint; every track offers an incongruent take on visceral gypsy-cabaret. But in the woozy carousel charm of Sea Creatures and You Whistle While You Sleep's double bass funk truax proves just how engrossing a little peculiarity can be. This is one eccentric who does not disappoint."
-The Skinny

****
"Much of the appeal of this mad musical scientist's music is novelty, but even the sardonically titled likes of The Basset Hound's Lament have a credible low-slung swagger and Truax himself is quite the eccentric crooner singing the outsider blues."
(4/5)-The Scotsman

"A cranium pouring with genuine innovation. Imaginative, out-there, rich in content." -plan B magazine

****
"As eccentric an artist as ever emerged from New York, the inventive and inspired Truax has now hitched his wacky wagon to Edinburgh's SL records, an entirely fitting way to mark the label's 10th anniversary.
...His third album features a bewildering array of homemade instrumentation, and a dozen warm and witty ditties.
Think Tom Waits and Thomas Dolby collaborating on the soundtrack for a Tim Burton film."
(4/5)-Scotland On Sunday

 

"A record brimming with musical ideas and life"
-Scott H, SoundsXP

"NEW YORKER SERENADES BRITISH TRAINS. OBVIOUSLY. Truax left New York to become a nomadic troubadour in Europe, spending enough time to pen his third album, featuring a song about British railways called Stranger On A Train, complete with reference to the free coffee served on Midland Mainline services. His DIY Americana marks him out as a budget Tom Waits with a comical bent - If We're Gonna Go Crazy is the tale of a talking penis and vagina. But then he'll launch into a romantic lament (Like A Fallen Tree) and suddenly he's a serious proposition" -Q

 

"Confirms a real and singular talent." (4/5)-the List

"Inevitably enough, the songs here are gloriously unpredictable, but not as mad as you might expect, ranging from the intimate and amusing to the inventive and kinda bizarre. The latest best songwriter you never heard of? He just might be."-Paul Sullivan, Flux

 

Thomas Truax
Why Dogs Howl At The Moon (SL) ****
"The pop world loves novelty and madness but it can be a fine line between being perceived as innovative quirky and as just plain annoying. Thankfully Thomas Truax largely avoids the latter although on initial plays I had my doubts. True, his rich voice and inflections may not be to everyone’s liking. Combined with the, at times, surreal lyrics and the information that he builds and utilises his own curious instruments you may be excused the need to run a mile to avoid this album but, hang in with me here…
… For songs such as ‘Sea Creatures’, ‘The Raindrop Says Goodbye To The Cloud’ and ‘Alien In America’ certainly have their ‘strange’ moments but are undeniably lovely. There’s method undoubtedly in Truax’s madness as well. ‘Alien In America’ mixes rattling junkyard percussion with a meaty bass drum thud and driving strings to foreground a lyric that sums up the madness of U.S. foreign policy. It’s a bleakly funny song that name checks Starbucks and Michael Jackson before dropping in lines as satirical and stark as any Jello Biafra ever came up with: ‘Mess with us, we’ll blow your little world away / We might just do it anyway’. On other songs Truax tackles insanity – ‘If We’re Gonna Go Crazy’ with its skewed rhythm track, skeletal feel and bizarre lyrics like ‘Said my penis to your vagina / I’m from Mars, you’re from Venus’, the terrors of modern urban life – ‘Escape From New York’ with its home made hip hop beats and organic feel, and death – ‘Like A Falling Tree’, a moving song with its picked guitar and strings, the dark words set off like a soothing lullaby. Poignant lines like ‘I cannot dream / I cannot see / Please remember me’ set the tone before it culminates in what sounds like a mad mariachi band bringing things to an end. ‘Why Dogs Howl At The Moon’ parts one and two seem to suggest that animals and insects are more intuitive and attuned to nature than humans. Part Two is particularly effective with an eerie noir feel offset by a discordant acoustic guitar break.

Comparisons are far and few between. A recent review of an Edinburgh show (elsewhere on this site) suggested that Truax falls somewhere between Jonathan Richman and Tom Waits and that’s as good a pair of reference points as I can come up with here. There’s an imaginative inventiveness and innocence to the lyrics, music and arrangements that echo elements of both along with a similar love of classic melodies combined with a need to mess ‘em up and torment them. Also, there’s a naivety that can sometimes seem twee but is tempered by a keen intelligence and a willingness to take risks and experiment. Oh, just in case I’m labouring the point I’ll condense it into this: he sings about animals and builds his own junkyard instruments! It is an outsider album with little care for fashion or fear of ridicule and for that I applaud it. It’s also an enjoyable, often engrossing record and for that I recommend it. Just remember though ridicule is nothing to be scared of but the reasons why dogs howl at the moon might be."
- Andy Wood, Is This Music magazine

 

 

Thomas Truax: Why Dogs Howl at the Moon
Reviewed By: Helen Tipping

Thomas Truax is originally from New York, but since his divorce has been homeless, touring Europe and playing all over the place until finally settling in South London, for the time being anyway.
The first song on this album, 'Stranger on a Train', is an ode to travelling on trains in the UK and namechecks just about every rail company going. A man after my own heart, he gets his priorities right with the lyric "on Midland Mainline you get coffee free", but there is much more to it than that, and anyone who's travelled on Britain's railways for any great length of time or regularity will recognise the myriad bizarre and surreal experiences detailed here.
The styles of music vary dependent on how he is feeling. 'Stranger on a Train' has a blues sound, whilst the second track 'Sea Creatures' is almost jazz-like. I'm not a huge jazz fan, so it doesn't appeal to me as much as the rest of the album. 'The Raindrop Says Goodbye to the Cloud' seems to be two songs in one, with slow wistful parts giving way to ranting fastness which eventually builds to a climatic ending. Truax appears to have been placed in the genre of anti-folk, which seems to be where record labels and journalists put artists that they find it difficult to pigeonhole. Perhaps such people are modern day composers or artists working in the medium of lyrical song, but outside of the boundaries that normally exist in the music business. Well, there's a thought that probably owes more to too much caffeine than anything else.

'Escape from New York' leaves the jazz sound behind much to my relief. It's a sparse and lo-fi ode to his leaving of his home town, a subject that provides the material for much of the album. Apparently it's played on his self-made instrument, the Hornicator - it sounds like something you might find in an Ann Summers catalogue and as I type Thomas is singing about a talking penis and vagina in the next track, 'If We're Gonna Go Crazy', a love song by all accounts. His lyrics betray a sense of humour which when combined with his ingenuity makes for a listening experience that is definitely out of the ordinary.

Madness is a well-trodden theme, well if you consider someone talking with their dog and the dog responding to be mad, as on the title track (pt 1) of the album. 'Alien in America' lists all the things that most people probably find normal about America, but that Truax finds alien to his existence. And if you were in no doubt that his is an original talent and view on life, 'Why Dogs Howl at the Moon Part 2' finds Truax's dog answering his question in an existential frame of mind, with the moon being the world's biggest fly away bone that the dog will only reach when s/he dies, with death not being the end but part of a greater cycle.
'Why Dogs Howl at the Moon' is original and witty, uses bizarre home-made instruments and offers what might I might call a "unique listening experience", if I was an estate agent in real life. But I'll just say instead that it's really rather good.

-pennyblackmusic.com