Big Dog is a record that tracks a journey, a personal odyssey through turmoil and built up from low points. It’s a document of resilience and hard work that its creator Bria Salmena put in as she shaped the music that mattered to her. And it’s thanks to the people she surrounded herself with too; Big Dog is an album of collaboration, borne of time working with those who helped foster her drive (Salmena is the frontwoman of Canadian post-punk outfit FRIGS and also a vocalist in Orville Peck’s live band). Multi-instrumentalist Duncan Hay Jennings, who is also a member of FRIGS and who produced Salmena’s first two EPs, returns by her side here (alongside co-producers Graham Walsh from Holy Fuck and U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy), adding texture and detail to Salmena’s sometimes shadowy and vague songwriting.
His additions and touches are welcome during some of Big Dog’s best moments: the way “Backs of Birds” kicks into gear from bobbing synths and softened drums; the muffled grittier edge to the downtrodden “Hammer”; “Stretch the Struggle”, where the arpeggiated synth sucks the song down a plughole; and the bleary, gauzy pedal steel smeared over the dazed “Twilight.” Jennings knows how to wrap up Salmena’s tracks, but equally knows when to let her pierce through. In the album’s second half Salmena bundles up all the frustration and rage she wades against on the first side and lets loose with stormy and raspy tones. On aforementioned “Stretch the Struggle” the way she insists “I need it” with a vivid desperation is scathingly enchanting, while on the fuzzy rocker “Rags” she screams a guttural snarl into the microphone as the song screeches to a close.
It doesn’t necessarily take Salmena veering into decimating her throat for Big Dog to pique interest, but it certainly helps add a dynamic range. There are no discernible duds across the 12 tracks here, but there are phases where the album muddies itself by not reinventing the wheel. Salmena occasionally colours outside the box, but often circles back to sounding like many others. “Closer to You” and even the fiery side of “Rags” and “Stretch the Struggle” evoke the yearn of Julien Baker while the woozy “See’er” (complete with guitarist Lee Ranaldo tethering the song together across its four minute runtime with wiry and speckled guitar notes that take the track to a peculiar and desolate landscape) could be an Ethel Cain outtake. As my colleague put it recently in a review of the latest girlpuppy album, there’s nothing inherently wrong with emulation, and Salmena using it as a channel to process and ruminate over her past and present certainly sounds like it’s doing some good.
Where the want is then is for some more specificity, more moments to help distinguish Salmena from those around her. There’s nothing to be said against being closed off about the meaning of a song and its origins (she is almost alarmingly brief about some tracks), but this feeds through into the lyrics. “All I had to do was lay my love on the line for you,” she sings on dusky country/indie cut “On the Line”, but it aches for just a few more strands of detail to make it hit hard. She paints a filmic scene on “Radisson” with pretty lines (“You look like someone that I used to kiss”) but it feels like dressing on top of not much else. On “Twilight” it works when she sings “It’s fine, it’s fine… I’m barely just a body” with a defeated sigh, as it speaks to the downtrodden tone. But a little more often than you’d like Salmena becomes her own self-fulfilling prophecy: on opening track “Drastic” she sings that “Words are just things to say”, and sometimes on Big Dog this rings a little too true.
But Big Dog is an album of journeys. Alongside the undefined emotional upheaval she undertakes, Salmena also uses travel as a throughline here. “I didn’t get on the plane / I just stared at the runway” she opens with, while on the following track she “thought about you on the airplane.” Moving to L.A., hotel bars, and trains to Japan crop up later, painting images of long distance relationships and generic backdrops/stopoff points for a touring musician. Whether all these details speak to the specifics Salmena has been through remains unknown, but it feels like an apt theme here: the journey is endless; there’s always somewhere to go; and making steps there is just as important as arriving.
