Brent Best – Your Dog, Champ

Denton, TX based Brent Best, lead singer and guitarist of the popular rock band Slobberbone, embarks on his first solo album with the release of Your Dog, Champ. Best agonized over the album for five years after he accepted donations to produce the record, he discussed his difficulty producing an album funded by fans in a letter to his fans. “But this wasn’t for a label,” he writes, “It was for you guys, directly. Now I was agonizing over everything.” Best wrote many of the songs years ago and slowly a common thread emerged for him within the record. Best’s a musical storyteller, and once he found his narrative he became more comfortable with the album. “Listening not to what I had recorded sonically”, he wrote to his fans,”  “but to what was written, what was being told. And then they started telling me what else to write, and what to look for, both now and from before.”

Your Dog, Champ is mostly a sad, anxiety-ridden album about a dysfunctional family. Best’s album makes the series “Game of Thrones” seem like a Disney movie. The listener should be ready to embrace some deeply disturbing themes that one does not find in other Americana songs about over-drinking, drugs, or lost girlfriends.

On the second song of the album, Best, in his outstanding storytelling manner, writes: “Mama you always told me that the only good man was a dead man,” and that the husband/father was a “Good Man Now” because “I nailed him to his bed, and I stood there and I laughed, while the sheets were dripping red.” In the song “Robert Cole”, the eight years aged boy playing hopscotch: “til she [his mother] howled my name and a shriek it came with a swell of shame and sadness, I just froze, with a pain I simply can’t define.” An abusive father regularly hurts the mother and the day before the kid’s birthday occurred another instance of the abuse.

Despite the sadness, the listener cannot turn away from the melodic, rhythmic narrative that runs throughout most of the album. The record is like a good book (a long one) that you cannot put down. Best’s guitar work and harmonica masterfully complement his ballads, many of which last for six minutes or more. Strangely, despite of the album’s melancholic message, Best’s voice and guitar work come across as slightly uplifting. Your Dog, Champ is not an album to play at a kid’s birthday party or a family reunion, but grab a good Scotch or IPA, settle into a comfortable chair, and you will not be disappointed. (+words: chris dishman @altcbeyond+)

Buy The Record Here!

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