1) A Life in a Day; 2) A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World; 3) Let Your Money Work for You; 4) The Plot; 5) Under the Plasticsink; 6) Celebrity Bones; 7) Girl with Attitude; 8) I Like to Be Somebody Else; 9) The Nightbus; 10) Poor Living; 11) Under Bad Influence; 12) Guess My Name; 13) Flu; 14) Man Who Brought Light into Darkness; 15) Everything Comes Back; 16) The Shop Detective; 17) Das Feuilleton Groovt Mit; 18) The Unfriendly World; 19) Are You Happy; 20) The Happy Hour; 21) The Blind Passenger; 22) Daydream; 23) 2 Sides of a Coin; 24) Trouble Couple; 25) Hall of Fame of Selfexploitation; 26) San Antonio; 27) Playing on the Piano of New Media; 28) Don't Take Money from Anyone; 29) All Fucked Up; 30) The Long Goodbye; 31) Give Me a Platform; 32) Walnut Kitten; 33) Another Day in Another Life
A cartoon potpourri of quirky melodies and kitschy grooves, that could have perhaps benefited from a bit more of a focus.
Key tracks: "A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World", "Everything Comes Back", "Walnut Kitten"
I ended up with a copy of this album largely by happenstance when a friend of mine was doing some collection spring cleaning by way of shoving me a ton of their CDs they didn't have room for anymore, and in lieu of actual knowledge a quick Internet search tells me that Jim Avignon - aka Neoangin - is a German do-it-all artisté (with the signature hat to match the accent on the stress, based on various photos) who mashes up cartoons, painting, music and performance art into a concoction that seems to have given him some degree of fame in Germany. Which makes perfect sense, because A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World is precisely the kind of music you'd expect from that kind of an artist.
The channel-hopping 33 songs and fifty minutes of A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World is a potpourri of kitschy sounds, MIDI production jobs and
happy-go-lucky sing-along melodies, with a dash of lamentations on the weight of the modern
world thrown in for good measure, sung with a heavy German accent. Avignon's world is a realm of
bright colours, cardboard backdrops and cartoon animals, and Neoangin
is his interpretation of pop music: the songs average on 1:30 to 2 minutes, most of them gleefully blur the borders between what's an interlude and what isn't, with blink-and-you-miss-it segues scattered liberally throughout. Avignon doesn't leave any room for subtlety or development - songs smack the listener right out of the gate with their most obvious, catchiest hooks and then either repeat it until they stick or until the next song suddenly appears. The lyrics try to aim for something deeper, with a prominent use of the traditional twist of introspective lyrics on top of deceptively upbeat music, but Avignon's bone-dry, barely-singing delivery makes them just as oddbeat as the musical backdrop; it's urban environment adulthood anxiety, if you happen to live in Toontown instead of New York. It's all very ridiculous, but also often genuinely charming or lovable.
My problem with A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World is perhaps more to do with me than the album itself, and it's that as a music listener I have issues keeping my attention span focused with quickfire snippet albums such as this. It's too much information in too small of a span of time and while I do appreciate that the manic nature of the record does fit with its music, in practice the album becomes a singular formless blob of music that moves from one thing to another so quickly I can't fully register the songs as they breeze past. Which, perhaps arguably, may as well be the point but while the melodies ring familiar to me when they play, it's another thing for them to actually stick. The primary exceptions for this are near the start and the end, and to some extent that's simply because they're the first and last things you hear when the record is on, but there's an argument that the bookends of the record are its most developed songs. The title track in particular is the most perfect pop song Avignon presents across the entire extended medley of a record and it's a genuinely great little ditty that, even if only two minutes in length, sounds more fleshed out and finished than anything else on the record. "Walnut Kitten" on the other end sticks out because of its calmer and more graceful touch. There are a few moments throughout the album where its facade as a goofy
cartoon jumble cracks and Avignon almost sheepishly creates something
more serious (the central third in particular is rich in this vein), and
the three-minute "Walnut Kitten" takes that to its logical conclusion
right at the end and acts as the comedown for the fifty-odd minutes preceding it: the friendly dog kicking off his shoes and slumping in his lazy chair after another long day in the unfriendly world. It's a lovely instrumental which allows Avignon to showcase that he is actually a really good composer and arranger in a way that the rest of the album's quick flashes necessarily doesn't do justice to, and tonally it feels like the right way to end the record.
That isn't to say that the rest of the album lacks memorability - "Everything Comes Back" with its chill frolic vibe in particular comes to mind - just that it's harder to to grab onto the great parts in the chaotic jumble of interludes, segues and speedrunning melodies. As said before that's an "it's not you, it's me" situation, and the manic colourful rush through the album's running length does befit Avignon's aesthetic and the tone of the songs: at the same time, the handful of songs that sound like their own thing instead of just a segment of a wider whole make a convincing argument that Avignon could have made a stellar 30-40 minute album just by focusing on those (and maybe he has and I'm unaware of it). The rambliness of A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World is what ultimately makes it a thoroughly charming curio rather than an actually great record for me - an album that I appreciate in its aesthetic and vibe more than I actually adore musically. But that said, I don't often get to say this about albums with such cartoony cover art, but A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World sounds exactly like it looks - and that alone is something worth cherishing.
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