Sound hounds

>> The Dionysian explosions
of Toronto’s Golden Dogs  

“I’ve never defined us as a party band,” says Dave Azzolini, frontman for Toronto’s Golden Dogs. “I’ve always wanted to make records that sound good and that feel good, and our live shows are pretty frenetic and energetic. It’s very much a ceremony of raising the spirits. Good rock ’n’ roll shows are like that—when you come out of it, you’re energized.”

Call it what you will, it sounds like a party from here. Azzolini and his wife Jessica Grassia, along with Taylor Knox, Neil Quin and Stew Heyduk, are currently heating up clubs nationwide with their rousing power-pop and new-wave-tinted tunes, heard on the band’s acclaimed sophomore LP, Big Eye Little Eye. And because this is a party town, Azzolini just may be pushed to the brink, as he has before, of puking. He refers to this chaotic state as “Dionysian explosion mode.”

“There are certain shows where the interaction between the band and the audience becomes so intense that the air is vibrating,” he explains. “Those are the best ones, where everyone’s feeding off each other, so much so that it gets to that boiling point where it could just fall apart.”

The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes the Dog, who was no friend of Dionysus, said, “I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels.” But some dogs aren’t so discriminating, like the yellow, pulsating canine that killed Azzolini in a dream he had four years ago, inspiring the band name.

Visitors to the Golden Dogs’ Web site can see more of Azzolini’s morbid sensibility on display in “The Skull Room.” It’s the working title of the band’s next album, based on the attic at his mother’s house in Thunder Bay.

“It looks like you’re inside a skull, especially when you’re high,” he says. And it turns out that the house he and Grassia are temporarily moving into in Toronto, where they’ll craft their next record, has a remarkably similar room. It’s also next door to a graveyard.

“I think we’re gonna be a goth band for the next album,” he says. “Actually, no.”

With the Yoko Casionos at
Main Hall on Thursday, Feb. 8, 10 p.m.