by Ben Hohenstatt (@Hohengramm)
Some good albums are enhanced by their release date, others succeed despite an apparent temporal disconnect. Bite, which ended a six-year stretch without a new album from the Austin scuzz-rock stalwarts A Giant Dog, falls into the latter category. Originally thrust upon the world by Merge Records amid the back-to-school trudge of late August 2023, Bite just feels better in the early summer months. It's a sweeping sci-fi concept album about a virtual reality called Avalonia that promises blissful perfection that it can’t, won't and doesn't deliver on. Bite uses those trappings to grapple with big topics – the perils of choosing your own reality, the inherent value of messy humanity in an artificially intelligent world, gender dysphoria – using equally big sounds. It's an album of would-be anthems with cinematic scope and fun sonic twists that make it a perfect fit for blockbuster season.
The surging synths and swirling strings that give Bite its IMAX-sized sound are unique in A Giant Dog’s catalog. It's genuinely impressive that after well over a decade of releasing music the band was able to add a significant flourish to its delightfully disheveled sound without it coming across as out of place or tacked on. Instead, the synth and strings are generally used to great effect in a variety of ways. Album-opener “Welcome to Avalonia” gains a sense of place from a shimmering synthesizer before stabbing strings enter the fray to help set an ominous tone Alfred Hitchcock would approve of. Elsewhere the new sounds are more of a complement than a centerpiece. On lead single “Different Than'' strings combine with front person Sabrina Ellis’ howl to send the song into the stratosphere, while follow-up single “I Believe'' uses them to sweetly fill the space left by delightfully crunchy guitar riffage. Of course, the strings also help bring Bite to a strikingly pretty close on “In Rainbows,” which might owe more to Ronnie James Dio’s old band than Radiohead. Yes, a song can both evoke Dio comparisons and be called pretty.
Bite’s ambitious sound and scope were a major focus of the album’s rollout and promotion. The opening of Merge’s album description sets its sights on the stars, stating, “The moment the needle drops on Bite, one’s conception of what an A Giant Dog record sounds like bends like space and time around a starship running at lightspeed.” That’s not untrue, but it also risks obscuring that Bite very much sounds like an A Giant Dog album. While it's true that the band’s past albums were built on a less-heady foundation of classic rock & roll sounds and buttressed by Ellis’ imitable vocals, it's arguable that Bite is less of a dramatic departure than it is a heightening of what A Giant Dog have have always done well. Gleefully bruising guitar riffs and weapons-grade hooks that were the bedrock of past A Giant Dog albums are still present and ultimately why Bite works as well as it does. Ornate arrangements that fall on the right side of decadent just tease out the hugeness that was already in the band’s shout-along songs and the operatic intensity of Ellis' singing. Plus, is it actually that wild for a guitar-rock band to release a sci-fi-tinged concept album replete with commentary about modern society? Sure, it doesn't happen every day, but it's hardly an unprecedented move in the annals of rock history – although it isn't usually done this well.
While some of Bite’s rock opera forebearers collapsed inwardly before realizing their narrative ambitions, ballooned to cartoonish excesses, or simply never officially came to be, this album side steps those problems. It’s well-paced and exceptionally lean by concept album standards, coming in at just over 35 minutes of music spread out across nine songs. That's just long enough to make it feel like a proper rock epic. It's also short enough to whet an appetite for the next installment in A Giant Dog’s suddenly, stunningly cinematic universe. Hopefully, it isn't six years away.