Year of the Month: Lend Hop Along's final album your ear

I come to praise Hop Along, not to bury it. Hopefully. 

Over the past half-decade, signs of life from the excellent Philadelphia quartet have been fleeting and sporadic. There have been some shows and a prominent cancellation, but no new music. Key contributors have turned their attention to other projects, and rumors of an indefinite hiatus or unceremonious end for the revered project are persistent but unconfirmed by the band.

Regardless of the understood status of Hop Along among its members, the reality is the same. Bark Your Head Off, Dog, Hop Along’s exceptional 2018 album, is the band’s final dispatch, and it seems likely it will retain that status for a while.

Bark Your Head Off, Dog is a worthy swan song that maintains the robust quality of Hop Along’s discography.  It’s evidence of a great band’s singular charms, an interesting evolutionary endpoint for a project that underwent significant and rapid changes over its short life and one of the best albums of 2018. 

“There you have it, the beginning and the end”

Hop Along’s story begins with Frances Quinlan, who gave her nickname, arresting voice and penchant for literary darkness to the enterprise, which began as a solo project. 

Way back in 2005, when Quinlan was an underclassman at Maryland Institute College of Art, they released their debut solo album under the name Hop Along, Queen Ansleis.¹ A few years later, with their studies finished, Quinlan moved to Philadelphia and continued to gig as Hop Along, Queen Ansleis. 

Quinlan’s ambitions included sounds they couldn’t make on their own, and by the late ‘00s, the band’s roster had grown and its name had shrunk. Drummer Mark Quinlan, Frances’ brother, and bassist Tyler Long joined the band. That trio, plus guitarist Dominic Angelella, released the EP Wretches in 2009. When it came time for Hop Along to record an LP as a full-fledged band, a search for a producer led to their friend Joe Reinhart, guitarist for the great Philly band Algernon Cadwallader.² Reinhart also played on that album, Get Disowned, and wound up joining the band, serving as the lead guitarist on both 2015’s excellent Painted Shut and Bark Your Head Off, Dog. Angelella fell out of the lineup, but there doesn’t seem to be any bad blood over the change.³

Hop Along’s music grew more polished and accessible across the band’s discography. The change from album to album means that there’s no universally agreed-upon definitive Hop Along release.⁴ It’s a discography that inspires camps of loyalists who glom on to whichever Hop Along LP best matches their personal taste. Get Disowned maintained much of the freak folk unpredictability present in Quinlan’s early solo work, but wrapped it in barbed wire. Painted Shut features some charmingly unvarnished acoustic songs, but is mostly a surprisingly muscular indie rock album. Bark Your Head Off, Dog is a further refinement.

With imagery heavy on wounded animals, lyrics preoccupied with capital punishment, and  “so strange to be shaped by such strange men” serving as an album-spanning motif, it’s still a long way from a conventional pop album. However, many of its songs are extremely melodic, and it’s the LP that dares to meddle with Quinlan’s voice, and that marks it as the closest thing to a pop album that Hop Along have made — or likely ever will make. 

“I am advancing”

Bark Your Head Off, Dog quickly makes its distinguishing characteristics apparent. 

Lead single, “How Simple,” which opens the album, is a bouncy track that deploys layered backing vocals to turn a catchy chorus into a full-on earworm. 

It begins in strummed soft-rock territory that could pass for a Sheryl Crow cut if it weren’t for Frances Quinlan’s inimitable voice. It’s an emotive, raspy and captivating instrument. When they sing softly, it sounds like an urgent warning — a distant train whistle before an imminent strike — echoing across a great distance. When the intensity is dialed up, Frances Quinlan is a raw-throated banshee who can imbue words with enough palpable passion to inspire sympathetic tensing in listeners’ vocal cords. On “How Simple,” and most of Bark Your Head Off, Dog, they forego their foundation-rattling yowl in favor of upper-register acrobatics, but in any mode, there are few people who sing like Frances Quinlan.

As the song goes on, it picks up its pace, finding a loping rhythm as the chorus hits. Mark Quinlan and Long do a great job providing the backbone for a surprisingly dance-y beat, and Reinhart rips off a fun solo, but the song’s most prominent feature is its bittersweet sing-song repetition of “Don’t worry, we will both find out/ Just not together.” It’s a sonic Superball destined to rattle inside the skulls of anyone who hears “How Simple.”  It’s jarring to hear Hop Along make a track that could conceivably play in a grocery store, but it works and the band doesn’t sacrifice too much of its identity at the altar of irrepressibility.

“Somewhere a Judge” lurches back toward sounds more familiar to Hop Along. It’s a slinky, smooth rocker that juxtaposes the comfort of a judge somewhere on a sandy beach with the state of Arkansas’ rush to execute multiple incarcerated people before the state’s supply of midazolam expired.⁵ While grim subject matter set to well-made indie rock was old hat for Hop Along, just before “Somewhere a Judge” hits the three-minute mark, Frances Quinlan’s vocals are stretched and polished using what sounds like exaggerated Auto-Tune. It’s an interesting use of the tool that neither adds much nor mars the song and shows a willingness to experiment with the most foundational pieces of Hop Along’s sound.

Experimentation is put on hold for the better part of two songs. “How You Got Your Limp” is a somber string-assisted folk song that uses the drunken behavior of a professor to examine power dynamics and public humiliation, two common topics in the Hop Along songbook. For its first two-thirds,  “Not Abel” is dramatic, dynamic medieval-sounding folk that lets Frances Quinlan show off every facet of their voice. After the song’s cloudy sky cracks, it morphs into a loose, warm jam. It’s in a tier with the “Can You Take Me Back” coda of “Cry Baby Cry” in terms of song snippets that should be fully fleshed out. 

“The Fox in Motion,” like its sly namesake, works in misdirection. It begins as a plinking indie pop prance in the mode of Bark Your Head Off, Dog’s opening track, but reorients itself around repetition of the phrase “How can I explain it?/ Having been seen/ What would that mean?” and picks up driving urgency. It’s an outro that started its life as the song’s chorus, but found a new home through editing, and it carries the song through the finish line at a sprint and sets the stage for the album’s best song.⁶

“One That Suits Me” is a jaunty indie pop song about world war and bomb development that manages to turn “In an open field/ Man is guilty always” into a hummable tick. The way the phrase “Of course I am for peace, of course I am for peace/ One that suits me, one that suits me” is gutting as its meaning, a professed defense of mass casualties, sinks in. While puncturing the bubble of realpolitik, Hop Along carves out room for a suitably epic fret-climbing guitar solo from Reinhart. Despite the grand ideas and big sound, “One That Suits Me” never loses an ounce of tunefulness. It’s an achievement and a great starting point for people deciding whether they want to hop into Hop Along’s music. “What the Writer Meant” isn’t much weaker and is even busier. The haunted chords that open the track are quickly joined by steady, decisive drums and subtly throbbing bass. More company and texture arrive in the form of fiddle, piano, mandolin and electric guitar. The song manages to sound rich rather than overcrowded, and having a lead singer who can elbow just about any sound out of the way with their voice definitely helped. 

Bark Your Head Off, Dog’s two longest songs bring the album to a close. It’s a canny move that lends the nine-song LP a sense of heft. “Look of Love” is a sprawling epic that reaches back to the lo-fi folk of Hop Along’s earliest releases and gathers mass as it rolls along. Tempo changes, gorgeous vocal harmonies and guitar heroics abound. “Prior Things” features an opening string arrangement that’s so preposterously pretty it borders on enraging. Where does music this good get off existing in this world? The strings don’t totally go away, but they retreat to the background as emotional indie rock takes a step forward. After the dalliance with conventionality, Frances Quinlan makes their way just a bit off mic to deliver the album’s most unruly shout-singing and gradually fades out as those damn gorgeous strings reassert themselves, gradually gaining fuzzy hum.

With the benefit of hindsight, it now sounds like flies descending on the cooling body of a gone-too-soon band. Maybe a miracle will happen, and Hop Along will get up and shake them off one of these days.

1. The album’s Bandcamp page still exists, and it’s adorable. ↩︎
2. The emo revivalists are still at it and put out a very good album earlier this year. ↩︎
3. Angelella led a super sweet interview with Frances Quinlan in 2020 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Fresham Year, the first Hop Along, Queen Ansleis album. ↩︎
4. Painted Shut has a slight edge in critical consensus, according to review aggregator Album of the Year, but direct democracy has both Get Disowned and Bark Your Head Off, Dog slightly ahead of Painted Shut over at Rate Your Music. Painted Shut is my personal favorite and maybe my most listened to album from 2015. ↩︎
5. It’s a morbid, true story that the American Bar Association delves into here. ↩︎
6. Frances Quinlan described their writing process and the band’s collaborative editing process in an interesting Q&A with Under the Radar. ↩︎