{"id":90876,"date":"2025-07-25T08:13:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T08:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/90876\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T08:13:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T08:13:11","slug":"forty-winks-love-is-a-dog-from-hell-ep-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/90876\/","title":{"rendered":"forty winks: Love Is a Dog From Hell EP Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every day this summer, I\u2019ve compulsively watched at least one video by the content creator Sam Todd<\/a>, whose job, I suppose, is influencing teens to be hyperconsumerist. She is on an endless vacation across the world, seemingly with the goal of collecting every city\u2019s exclusive Pandora charm; she knows, intimately, how much rare Labubus go for in Singapore, London, and Vietnam\u2014because she\u2019s spent hundreds on them in each destination\u2014and is waging what she describes as a \u201cwar\u201d against Labubu resellers, which she is very clearly losing.<\/p>\n

When I listen to Pittsburgh four-piece forty winks\u2019 almighty, intense, totally unhinged garage-pop banger \u201ccommie bf,\u201d which I have also done every day this summer, and Cilia Catello sings that \u201ceveryone and everything makes my ears ring,\u201d it\u2019s Todd and her army of dangling \u201cpurse pals\u201d that flash into my brain, along with pictures of genocide, my weird and evil landlord, J.K. Rowling, Alex Warren<\/a>, the AI videos I keep falling for, and the anti-microplastics laundry bag I was told to buy, only to find that it\u2019s made of polyester. \u201cCommie bf\u201d is is instantly one of those all-time rock songs because it\u2019s fiendishly catchy and it starts at 100 percent intensity and ends somewhere around 175 percent, but also because forty winks\u2019 mixture of deadpan nihilism, radio rock riffs, and wits-end head voice hits the exact right frequency to tune out all the stupid annoying bullshit for two minutes and 20 seconds.<\/p>\n

\u201cCommie bf\u201d is the best song on Love Is a Dog From Hell, forty winks\u2019 short but effective debut EP, which pulverizes punk, garage, and indie rock into a caustic, addictive goop. The expectations set by each track are immediately toppled by its successor; opener \u201cliadfh\u201d is a pixelated nu-shoegaze dirge not dissimilar to much of the TikTok rock that proliferates on Spotify, but it\u2019s immediately followed by \u201ccommie bf,\u201d which sounds like Olivia Rodrigo<\/a> sitting in with Germs<\/a>. Then comes \u201cSpurs,\u201d a dreamy love song (\u201cYour lips, on mine, just when I say goodbye,\u201d sings Conner McGee) that makes room for a few seconds of assaultive black metal, and ends with a blistering, almost laughably capital-R Rock solo.<\/p>\n

These songs get off on shock value, but forty winks have a knack for organised chaos: \u201cSpurs\u201d barrels forward in such a way that by the time you get to said black metal interlude, Colin Klink\u2019s halting drums have already warned you that something bad is about to happen; \u201cnoise\u201d counterbalances its cardiac-arrest rhythms with Catello\u2019s surging hooks. Like \u201ccommie bf,\u201d it\u2019s an opaque song whose snotty rebellion originates entirely in Catello\u2019s deliciously snarky delivery: \u201cI\u2019ve got noise\/In my head\/What is so important about walking aimless?\u201d she sings, with such petulant verve that it\u2019s clear you don\u2019t want to be on the receiving end. It\u2019s a venomous song\u2014but in times like these, forty winks\u2019 punishing math-punk feels like an antidote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every day this summer, I\u2019ve compulsively watched at least one video by the content creator Sam Todd, whose…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":90877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1939,171,975,67,132,68,1940],"class_list":{"0":"post-90876","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114912874154543965","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}