REVIEW: Remi Wolf, 'You’re A Dog!'
By Alex Ramos
Photograph by Sophie Hur
Remi Wolf’s music is Bay Area ego with Los Angeles polish, bright and concentrated. Her first EP, You’re A Dog!, landed at the tail end of last summer— fitting for a collection of tunes that are humid at times, and breezy at others.
Opener “Sauce” is of the former, casually blending soulful melodies with proper funk instrumentation. Leading with a warbled voice over lo-fi guitar, Wolf goes into a melancholy sway about giving up distractions (“When I’m fresh out of ideas again / And the lost dog out the window finds it home / I let the smog roll over my mind”) and coming to terms with what’s about to happen (“Let’s take off both of our crowns and / Surrender this battle”). The groovy bass carries her vocal, which is round and full, but never boring. It bends and reaches towards every cardinal direction; there’s a playful sensuality that swims even when Wolf’s tone turns sensible and pragmatic, singing, “You make sure I’m level like a pile of laundry / Like the paintings on my wall.” Halfway through, it trails out. The track turns sweet and tender again with a stream of something like xylophone, evoking images of blue skies and wind chimes. It rests only for a while, before Wolf breaks into the song’s transformation: sultry vocal, a wash of harmonies and dense beats. Wolf’s voice circles, enamoured: “We’re making love / (My favorite drug)”. It loses steam, eventually jumping back to the same line that “Sauce” opens with— “Memorize what I can’t find in you / Memorize what I can’t… ” She’s collected, back to square one, at least until her voice warps on the way out.
“Guy” is another standout, a sun-kissed track “about an anxious brain.” It paces in with vocoder singing, “Licking up tables / Licking up tables.” It recalls the talkbox-era flair of Zapp’s “Computer Love,” and new wave group Tom Tom Club’s hit “Genius of Love.” It isn’t too far off stylistically with fluttering guitars and synths, but thematically, Wolf walks another route. Her lyrics read like the texts you write out and delete, over and over, just to see what it would feel like to send (“I was never right for you my dear / But it’s you”). There’s a burst of clarity, and even disappointment, somewhere down the line. But Wolf’s scatterbrain is inevitable, so she gives in to her intentions, chanting, “And I wanna get your number / I wanna feel your thunder.” In a swift turn, she’s hopeful again: “You know that I’m right for you my dear / ‘Cuz it’s you.”
You’re A Dog! pulls from every pixel of the musical spectrum— pop, R&B, Neo-Soul, even P-Funk— sonically covering a lot of ground. It takes nostalgic motifs and familiar sounds, rearranging them into hyper saturated cut-and-paste collage pop, all tied together by Wolf’s booming voice. The EP is a constant upward trajectory, stretching the potential of her ideas. “Shawty,” the final track, is at the peak. It picks up traction from the yearning of “Sauce,” and kicks it into high gear. The song recounts a casual queer hookup (“Shawty wanna fuck me / But only when she likes me”) with more nuance than it usually catches (“Shawty picking on me / While I’m picking up her laundry”). There are two sides to it. For one, there’s a concern for the lover, who is sometimes mean, but Wolf can see losing her way; on the other, there’s the fun and games that Wolf enjoys playing— or the “rim-bim-bow” of relationships that are secure in being laid-back, that seek comfort in “[loving] it away.” Their bond is more accepting and less clean-cut than what messy queer relationships typically come by in any media, making it all the more true. Throughout the record, Wolf is back and forth with ideas. Her vocal is elastic, going from wistful to uncompromising, in seconds. Her sound takes from the past but is in a league of its own. She possesses a rare kind of self-awareness that doesn’t drag and instinctively moves on to the next big thing. If this is only the beginning for Remi Wolf, she just might be that.
