Until You've Heard Dog Hair Dressers, You Have Not Really Lived

Very often when I watch something on YouTube, and then forget to close its browser window, my buddy Al Gorithm plays the Dog Hair Dressers’ “Board Game” from around 2000, which is pretty darned serendipitous, in view of how much I love the Dog Hair Dressers. To tell you the truth, I can’t think of another rock and roll band I’ve loved so much this century.

You may elect to think of them as the Japanese Ramones, or, alternatively, as Tokyo’s answer to Brooklyn’s sometimes glorious The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Leader Asako Ota sets her Strat and amplifier to Maximum Grunge, and then sings a pretty melody (in what I assume is Japanese) over the 140 bpm bombast, from which any trace of subtlety has been exiled. It couldn’t be less wonderful.

I have been able to surmise that Ms. Ota, who is now a wife and mama of two, began her career at 19, with a group called the King Cardigans, no relation to Sweden’s [just plain] Cardigans . She recorded a demo of her song “Flows” on a cassette, sent it to Sony, and off she went. When the Dressers broke up in 2001, she formed another group, The Maltese, and kept making glorious music.

I have spent many happy hours reflecting on the name Dog Hair Dressers, which reminds me of the American band the Swimming Pool Cues, in that attaching the middle word to either its predecessor or successor gives entirely different impressions. Did Ms. Ota’s group wear garments made of dog hair, or was the idea that they were dogs who moonlighted as hairstylists?

As someone who used to get both paid and laid for expressing his opinions about popular music, I am able to assert that Asako Ota ranks with Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval among popular music’s great under-praised women. That Lana del Rey, who brazenly stole Sandoval’s schtick, is rich beyond imagining, while Sandoval enjoyed about 45 seconds of acclaim, is as unconscionable as Madonna having enjoyed greater popularity than Cyndi Lauper, or VHS having shown Betamax the door.