Three Music Thingz with Those Dogs

Oi oi! Welcome back to a brand-new edition of Three Music Thingz, where I ask music people for three thingz that are essential to their music-making.

Today we've got three thing-style picks from Those Dogs, a punk band hailing from western North Carolina. Here's what I know about North Carolina: it's awesome, the landscape is beautiful, and the state has proliferated my personal favorite style of BBQ...damn, I want some pulled pork and an ice-cold Cheerwine right about now. This is what I get for blogging while hungry.

Those Dogs put out their first full-length album, Nobody Laughed (and Everyone Hated Us) in August, and it's a big fat dose of the rowdy riff-y medicine your punk rock doctor prescribed you. (Tired: The Punk Rock MBA. Wired: The Punk Roc Doc.) I love last track "For You," a surprisingly romantic waltz ("I'll wait for you forever / 'til it all falls / 'til the world finally ends") with a soaring guitar solo, packing quite a bit of yearning into a sub-2-minute length. Play the album for a much-needed blast of turbulent energy.

Anyway, here are three thingz that have contributed to the tunes of Those Dogs:

Studio 611
This is where we recorded our first full length, Nobody Laughed (and Everyone Hated Us). The studio is really just a shed at our drummer KC’s parents house in Daddysville, NC. We pretty much just got to chill, eat pimento cheese sandwiches, and make a pyramid of miller light cans for 3 days while we cranked our album out. Pretty sick overall.
Jacob’s Vocal Academy
After releasing our album we hit the road and headed north on our first tour. This was the biggest stretch of shows we have ever done so making sure we still had a voice after shows was super important. Thank god for Jacob’s Vocal Academy vocal warmup exercises. These warmups stretch our vocal chords between shows and helped us maintain our voice! Nothing like cruising down the highway with the windows down screaming “mommy made me mash my m&ms”.
Blinky
Heading north on our tour we found ourselves in states with fully recreational cannabis dispensaries. Being from North Carolina, such a thing is a site to behold. These places look like sterile over contemporary Starbucks but for weed. We decided on disposable vaporizer pens, or as the kids call them: Blinky. We learned very quickly that the NJ turnpike is not the most fun place to navigate after taking a trip to Blinkerton City. Nonetheless, the Blinky fueled our travels and definitely did not contribute to the $80 toll ticket we got for using a fast pass lane.