Almost a year ago exactly, one intrepid Flagpole reporter sat down with Athens indie-pop darlings Dog Person to discuss their upcoming album. That interview, much to the delight of all involved, quickly devolved into a somewhat unhinged discussion that touched on topics from Roman architecture to canine anatomy, but notably contained little discussion of the album in question.
Now, after the city has undergone the great exodus of college students, townies are crawling out of the woodwork, and we all have a little more room to spread our legs, let’s throw on Dog Person’s debut record Late Bloomer and pretend everything is all right in the world for a little while.
Featuring members of Nana Grizol and Go Public, Dog Person has been making crowds around town howl at the moon in energetic live shows.
Late Bloomer is a fitting title for the record considering tracking began in 2022 in bass player Jay Domingo’s basement, but stagnated. The project moved to the basement of friend of the band Ian Darken in 2023 with similarly fruitless results. “I guess we finally realized basements weren’t really working out for us,” said Lauren Gregg, keyboard player and primary songwriter for the band. So, the whole affair moved to Studio 1093 on Boulevard, where they both finished the record and recruited guitar player and studio owner Gray Reilly to the band.
The batch of 10 songs underwent revision after revision, small instrumental tweaks and late night ideas conjured up by band members, until they reached their current form. “It could always be improved upon,” Gregg said, “but I think we finally said, ‘No, it has to stop!’ We’re really happy with how it ultimately turned out.”
The result is 10 tracks of canine wonder, clocking in at 24 minutes, driven by shimmering guitar, unrestrained drumming and Gregg’s characteristically detached vocals. Lyrically, the songs belie their sonic character with themes of failed romance, anxiety, occasional depression and the hidden joys of living in a town like Athens.
“In Love With a Ghost” was an early release from 2022’s Doggie Demos. Gregg plays
her Casio on a setting reminiscent of a baseball stadium organ on the song, which showcases some of Reilly’s best guitar phrases on the entire album.
“We all live here in this small town/ Writing songs about how we live in a small town,” Gregg writes in “All The Time,” a slightly ironic look at the Athens music scene and its denizens.
The album cover features Gregg in 1989 with her Christmas present that year: a Tyco Hot Lixx electric guitar, a toy synthesizer that would play pre-recorded 16-bit tracks to make you seem like a guitar god. “I wanted to be in a band so badly when I was a kid,” Gregg said. “I got an actual electric guitar for my birthday in ninth grade after much begging.”
Gregg received two lessons from a nun, which she suspects was a tactic from her parents to avoid her learning any devilish rock and roll music, before she gave up. Gregg and the other members of the band discovered music later on in adulthood, “late bloomers” as it were. The cassette insert provides photos of every member of the band in “their most awkward phases,” so there’s some incentive to bring back physical media.
If anything, this album alone proves that late bloomers can sometimes bear the best fruit. Late bloomers have seen the mistakes made by those they think are “further along” than them, whether in life, music or careers. They have had more time to get their ducks in a row, as it were, and the self-consciousness of feeling “behind” your peers transforms eventually into a resilience they may not necessarily possess to face the inevitable difficulties of life.
So, if being a late bloomer is a sin, I hope you’ll forgive Dog Person. They have offered up a wonderful album as penance.
Gregg said the band does not currently have any plans to tour out of Athens, but Dog Person is such a treat that we’re tempted to keep them for ourselves anyway. Although the album release show took place earlier this month, Dog Person will be playing the AthFest Music & Arts Festival club crawl. Catch them at Buvez on Saturday, June 21 at 9 p.m.You can listen to Late Bloomer on all streaming services, as well as physically on cassette.
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