ALBUM REVIEW: Dog Eat Dog - Walk with Me

I've never been to a Frat party, but I've seen enough movies like American Pie and I know What you did last Summer in the late 80s and early noughties to understand what goes on. Enter the house with Greek letters across the top, drinking from a kegger, turning the front room into dance floor and having a party playlist that spans youth culture at the time. You can throw away the playlist for this particular frat party because Dog Eat Dog’s lost album Walk with Me comprises all the subcultures that would interest all the participants of a late 90s and early noughties Frat party. 

Everything gets covered here from pop punk, hardcore, ska, punk, reggae, hip-hop and new metal. And all this coming for a band that already had huge amount of air miles underneath them with touring Europe and America excessively…. surely, you're on to a winner?? The album does demonstrate a maturity in song writing in many of the songs with a smoother and less abrasive production job then their other albums. Album openers Showtime, Hell Yeah and Undivided show the pop punk, nu-metal influences but with a little more introspection and a far more professional setup. We still get the horns featuring highly, the basic rapping over the top but nevertheless the first three songs shoot by fairly quickly. The Dog Crew did spring from the hardcore scene which is represented with the ridiculous MILF. References to Suicidal Tendencies and Danzig at the end but with the title such as it is and the subject matter of the song being extremely adolescent, no hardcore band would ever take this seriously unless you are Dog Eat Dog. 

They do expand on their hardcore roots later in the album with the song called My Frustration. Adventure further into the American subculture at the time with funk metal and crude scratching on All Night and the reggae tinged ESB. Get a little bit of street punk going on with Cannonball and some hip hop with Dark Secrets. 

Like all good playlists or as we used to call them back in the day, mixtapes, things would get lost and I'm sure frat parties were no exception. Which is very apt seeing as a few legal disputes with their record label in 2006, after the recording of the album meant that Walk with Me was only released and available for a short period of time. However now in 2024 you can listen to the album with all the usual vinyl and CD packages available. This album has a sense of a compilation done by one band. It's a bit behind the curve but if you were a full paid-up member of the Dog Crew back in the day it’s probably worth a listen. One for the completists and the curious.

Walk with Me is released via Metalville on 20th September

Review by Carl Black