Photo: Ebru YILDIZ
I’m trying not to get too distracted by the dog. But the dog won’t stop smiling at me.
His name is Watley, and he’s a delightfully floofy 60-pound chow chow with a contagious permagrin. He goes just about everywhere with his person Kassie Carlson, the singer of the experimental electronic-pop band Guerilla Toss.
Watley tours with the band and appears in videos and on merch. He’s listed as a band member (“dog”) on the Guerilla Toss Wikipedia page. He even got to be there when Guerilla Toss signed their contract with esteemed indie label Sub Pop in the spring of 2020. Today, Watley gets to ride along to band practice.
“That’s [one of the] reasons why I trusted Sub Pop immediately, because we went to visit their office and there were like 10 dogs running around,” Carlson says via video call. “I brought Watley, it was like a dog party.”
Carlson tilts the camera toward Watley’s face to show off his goofy tongue-out grin. I resist the urge to ask him about his favorite snacks.
In March, Guerilla Toss released their full-length Sub Pop debut, Famously Alive. Carlson, guitarist Arian Shafiee and multi-instrumentalist Peter Negroponte wrote the record while riding out the pandemic lockdown in Catskill, N.Y., where Carlson lives.
It’s a noticeable departure from their previous work. Guerilla Toss has always had a spirited and disjointed art-punk foundation. On 2017’s GT Ultra, for example, Carlson does more shouting and monotonous speaking than singing, and the music, though compelling, is fragmented and at times abrasive. Older songs sound to me like The B-52s, Talking Heads and The Dismemberment Plan are all practicing in the same building, and you can hear bits of everything all at once from the basement, where you and your friends are trying to pick up krautrockers on a 1970s HAM radio. It’s a lot.
Famously Alive is more focused. It’s shinier and brighter — lyrics notwithstanding — and its clear pop melodies hold strong through those experimental layers of electronic samples and textural elements. Instead of a mishmash of noodling getting thrown into a pot — though that’s not necessarily a bad thing! — Famously Alive feels more thoughtfully crafted and less chaotic. That reflects how the band members, along with the occasional musician friend, built on one another’s ideas.
The lyrics to “Happy Me” came about after Carlson heard a beat Negroponte and Shafiee were making in another room. “Those words just came out sorta like a mantra,” she says — and the surprising, delightful Prince-like guitar riff in “Mermaid Airplane” was a last-minute addition by Wes Kaplan of Boston band The Craters. “It was kind of like a little sprinkle on top towards the end, and it totally changed [the song] to something awesome,” says Carlson.
The most obvious example of the band’s sleeker sound is the title track, a gleefully woozy psych-pop journey in which Carlson attempts to guide you to your happy place, as she croons: “Stay famous / Famous in your mind / Keep it famous / Famous all the time.” In the music video for the song, she delivers this advice while lounging in a Clifford-scale model of Watley’s dog food bowl. It’s a much-appreciated shot of dopamine on all levels.
Were these words Carlson herself needed to hear during the pandemic? Or was she anticipating what fans would want to hear once the COVID clouds started to lift?
“I think it was a little bit of both,” she says. “But of course when you’re writing, it is a little bit selfish and you’re thinking about yourself. But it’s not all positivity. There’s definitely processing some heavy stuff.”
Over the years Carlson has also been open about her hard-earned life lessons. That includes her opioid addiction that resulted in a blood clot, which required open-heart surgery.
In “Happy Me,” when she’s not repeating the title like a mantra, Carlson sings fragmented thoughts that paint a bleaker picture: “Absent a fact / Words are abstract / When the danger is nameless / Foreign and shapeless / Madness had me / Floating debris / On the void of anxious / Blanketed anguish.”
Her lyrics are ambiguous but bold in the song “Wild Fantasy” too, despite the lush and lovely chime-filled music. “That wicked’s your own / Soft crime with a chemical empathy,” she sings. “Too-easy escape / That led to impossible circumstance / The more that you move / The tighter the trap it just captures you / Slow sound of the crush / Scratches over the surface so vividly.”
At a glance, Guerilla Toss may look like a colorful explosion of positivity — their lineup includes a dog, after all. But even with a slick new coat of glossy paint, their songs are still nuanced expressions of relatable human experiences. To make Famously Alive, they had to push through the same self-doubt and uncertainty we’ve all experienced during the pandemic.
“Especially being a female musician, you’ve got this super impostor syndrome,” she says. “Your art that you create may not look like other people’s, but if you are working really hard at it and you feel in your heart that it’s good, you gotta go with that.”
As Carlson says this, Watley continues grinning behind her. Sensing his smile, she tilts the camera toward his face again and I can no longer resist. I must speak to Watley. I’m sure I’m not the first journalist to be smitten with the 6-year-old pup. Carlson laughs, and answers my question before I’m even able to ask: “Favorite tour snack: Cheez-Its and peanut butter crackers.”
