Dachshund is a progressively-minded rock band hailing from Oklahoma, the gothic-conservative heart of the midwest. We smuggle art-rock ideas into pop-songs, delighting in subtle subversions of the mainstream.
Our music draws from a wide variety of influences. Looming large, you might hear the nervy syncopation of the Talking Heads, the head-trickery of Radiohead or Soundgarden, the mercurial temperament of Sunny Day Real Estate, and Mike Patton’s smart-alecky disregard for convention. Other influences may become apparent as well, from the punk-metal of Helmet to the jazz-rock of Steely Dan. There’s surely a liberal amount of David Bowie in the mix, a bit of Rolling Stones swagger, and a Beatles-esque love of blending all these disparate strands together.
We usually throw several influences into the pot at once — not in a deliberate, self-conscious way, but in a way that just feels organic to us. We have a healthy appreciation of odd time-signatures, unusual key-changes, conceptual lyrics, artful dissonance, and noise. However, our songs also generally have verses and choruses, and actual hooks. So we wrap the art within a pop candy-coated shell, you see. We’re sneaky like that.
David Thomas of Pere Ubu once tagged his own band with the label “Avant-Garage,” which is a pretty funny play on words, and I wish we had thought of it first. “Avant Garage” might describe Dachshund pretty well — except that we’re only a little bit “avant,” and we don’t sound anything like Pere Ubu.
People tend to ask about our name. The fact is, we just liked the sound of it, and it made us laugh. We adopted the name as a way of ribbing standard notions of “cool.” We’re too cool to be cool, you know? ;-)
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Dachshund is:
Mazus Graves – guitars and vocals
Eric Hartley – guitars and vocals
Matt Mayo – bass guitar
Jason Booze – drums
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Previous members:
Andy Jenson – bass (founding member)
Matt Taylor – drums (founding member)
Adam Karleskint – drums
Bee Meddler – drums
Lee Moody – drums
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We play frequently in our hometown of Tulsa, OK,
but have also performed in
Eureka Springs AR
Springfield MO
Dallas TX
Saint Louis MO
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Discography:
As of January 2021, we have self-released two albums, and are working on a third.
Our first, 2011’s The Ballad of Shorty Long, was a collection of ramshackle bangers, a visceral and slightly odd set of tunes which wore its ‘90s alt-rock influences on its sleeve.
Our second album, 2016’s Crooked House, made a deliberate turn toward introspection and nuance, featuring more personal material as well as a handful of art-punk rockers and a couple of barn-burners.
Our third album, Phantasmagoria, is in the works. Unified around a backbone of gothic-rock, but swirling into psychedelic vistas, it presents a concept-album which begins in Tulsa’s famous bygone haunted-house, and which spirals out along themes of love, transgression, sin, and death. We are working toward a late 2021 release.
Find us on Facebook, ReverbNation, SonicBids, or Bandcamp.