Bark Your Head Off, Dog

Stepping away from the noise and taking an evermore artful approach to heartfelt pop is a bold, brilliantly smart move and on Bark Your Head Off, Dog the results are borderline magical.

Bark Your Head Off seem like a gamble, given its broader palette. It only takes a few listens to realize that it is really the fulfillment of the band's potential, though. ... Hop Along are truly a band at the top of their game.

The songs are bigger, the production is bolder, and Hop Along is more confident than ever, expertly weaving fresh, unexpected elements into its sound.

Freer of their influences, Hop Along have produced a stunning batch of songs--each of them like a small world of its own, continuously unfolding.

While ‘Painted Shut’ saw Hop Along forcefully establish themselves as a band to be reckoned with, LP3 shows they’re just as enticing and attention-grabbing when practicing restraint

The album as a whole feels warmer, more spacious. The songs on Painted Shut were doled out like 10 fist-shaped car door dents, but Bark Your Head Off, Dog moves at an agitated hum.

While something is almost always askew, on average, the album feels a little broader and brighter than Painted Shut. Thankfully, it does so without sacrificing lyrical impact or smoothing out Hop Along's distinctive, compelling sound.

Bark Your Head Off, Dog is another great Hop Along album, intimate and grand in a way only few can do.

Through her fictitious accounts, the band follows with a harmonious balance of dissonant transitions. Other times, their song structures are more conventional, even if they take on a few grinding solos and lush string accompaniments. It makes for a sometimes confounding if indecisive listen, but Quinlan's passionate eye for detail hasn't withered in the slightest.

It’s an album that flatters to deceive in its use of string arrangements throughout, and may leave some long-time Hop Along fans shrugging a little on their first few times through. However, as with most densely made albums, the more time and effort you spend on it, the more you will get out of it.

Everything about the Philadelphia quartet's sound on their latest record sounds more accomplished, but also more polished, which takes a little from what made Hop Along such an exciting prospect on previous songs such as "The Knock."

An album both more mature and more realised than anything Hop Along have realised previously, Bark Your Head Off, Dog is a deft balance of quiet, folky meanderings and rousing slabs of indie rock, the two combining in to an amalgam that on paper, shouldn’t really work, but in practice cements Hop Along as far more than another quirky indie pop band, and elevates them in to another realm entirely.