Dining With Dogs

stream Austin noise rock trio Dining With Dogs' (BLK OPS, The Dead See) debut album

Dining With Dogs is a new-ish Austin noise rock trio with some familiar faces: guitarist/vocalist Mark Key (The Dead See, BLK OPS), drummer Josh Paul (The Dead See), and bassist Marcos Morales (music video director for Today Is The Day, Primitive Man, Inter Arma). At a live show in March, they covered a Today Is The Day song with TITD’s own Steve Austin on guest vocals, and in one of his recent Cameo videos, The Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid‘s David Yow recommends their upcoming debut album The Problem With Friends. Well, sort of. “I’ve not heard it, I don’t know what it sounds like, but they paid me 20 bucks to tell you about it,” he says. It makes sense that David Yow would like this album though — it’s not too far removed from the type of noisy post-hardcore that his own bands helped pioneer, and Dining With Dogs do this type of thing well.

The album was recorded with Craig Delony (who also played synth on it), mixed by former Red Sparrowes/Made Out of Babies member Brendan Tobin, and mastered by Brad Boatright, and it comes out this Friday (5/15) on a new label run by Morales’ Dirt City Studios (pre-order physical or digital). You can hear it right now though, as a full stream premieres in this post.

Here’s what Mark Key tells us about the album, and some of the individual songs:

The title “The Problem with Friends” means that when you are close to people they can hurt you. They die, they fail, and life carries on because the world itself can be cold and uncaring.

The three of us have been playing music together for 20 years. Last May right after most of the tracks for this album were put down our drummer collapsed at work. After being rushed to the hospital we found out he would need brain surgery. There have been times in the last year that we thought we were losing one of our best friends. We thought we were done and that this record would never see daylight. After surgery and two months in the hospital he has made a miraculous recovery, and the album name took on a new layer of irony.

I think it is important that the listener have the opportunity to interpret the lyrics for themselves but all of the lyrics (if there is a universal theme) deal with existential questions of modern life.

“Puzzled” was written for my young daughter: “life is not a puzzle to solve and there’s no right answers”

“Sweet Talkin’ Psycho” is about lust that makes us do stupid things. Then later you say the girl was just too crazy for you but clearly you were acting crazy too.

“Spreading Thin” is about being homeless and broke. The streets are a jungle

“Killing Machine” is about how violence is somehow part of our DNA as humans. “Killer Apes have come a long way” but we are also destroying the planet and each other. “It’s time to erase the master race.”

Listen below:

And watch the Today Is The Day cover with Steve Austin and the David Yow cameo video: