W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

09. Who Will Look After The Dogs – PUP (Diminishing Returns Music)

PUP’s 2019 release, Morbid Stuff was my favorite album of that year. To me, it was a quintisential pop punk album. Unfortunately 2022’s The Unraveling of PUP, The Band did not strike me the same way. Well, with this year’s Who Will Look After The Dogs?, the PUP band that I have grown to know and love is back. A return to form album, Dogs is chock full of hard hitting guitar and drums that’ll have you bouncing off the walls. We also get a strong mix of Stefan Babcock’s sardonic writing style that at times is loaded with sarcastic humor (Don’t you Christians spend half of your days on your knees already from “Olive Garden”) but at other moments, consumed with vitriol and contempt (I don’t need hope, I don’t need any hope now
(It’s killing me) I’ve had enough of that and it’s killing me
(Ah-ah-ah-ah) It’s burned a hole
(Oo-oo-oo-oo) And it’s torn right through
My whole body) from the albums opening track “No Hope”). My favorite tune on the album, however, has to be “Getting Dumber”, a collaboration between the band and their longtime friend and mentor, Jeff Rosenstock. With Steve Sladkowski’s driving guitar starting things up before Zack Mykula (drums) and Nestor Chumak (bass) dive in with a pounding rhythm backtrack the track boils over into a massive onslaught with the blood curdling shouting of Stefan as he raps the verse Seventeen ways I can stop this
Seventeen nights in this coffin like he was Ad Roc on The Beastie’s “Sabotage”. The bottom line is Who Will Watch the Dogs is a banger which combines the adrenaline fueled pop punk music which made PUP (in)famous to begin with with Babcock’s tormented lyrics.

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