Clark Sus Dog Review: A Series of Ghostly, Frustratingly Opaque Soundscapes

Chris Clark’s Sus Dog tries on a number of stylistic tics—from stuttering electronics to eerie vocals—that recall those of its executive producer, Thom Yorke, but rarely finds a means of organically incorporating them into the IDM veteran’s bass-heavy sound. The zippy “Town Crank” and sulky title track struggle to employ Clark’s limited voice effectively, proving to be little more than imitations of Yorke’s saturnine shtick on albums like Anima.

“Alyosha” starts things off promisingly, with Clark’s hazy atmospherics and vocal warbling setting an alien tone. But he quickly switches to falsetto just as the track begins to pick up steam, and his wispy vocals and repeated mantras about how someone is “lying” to themselves while “telling everybody else the truth” clash with the track’s rhythmically darting instrumentation. Elsewhere, “Forest” starts off with a vast, contemplative soundscape courtesy of the Budapest Art Orchestra, with Clark’s timbre evoking a grand adventurer who’s speaking to the trees.

The gorgeous “Clutch Pearlers” offers a bit of a reprieve, with Clark harmoniously cooing along to the track’s peppy aural elements, including springy synths and exuberant percussion. Even better is the sweeping “Over Empty Streets” and the rave-influenced “Wedding,” both of which feature no singing whatsoever, while “Dologoch Tape” mixes Clark’s vocals so low in the mix that he’s practically inaudible by the song’s shimmering end.

Notwithstanding a few interesting compositional quirks, such as the heavy breathing that slowly subsumes the mix on “Dismissive” and the ticking metronome that’s paired with a grand piano on closer “Ladder,” the remaining tracks feel so incoherently sequenced that locating the album’s thread becomes maddeningly unrewarding. Perhaps it’s something about how we’re not being our true selves, about how life finds us all “living on a ladder stuck between two floors,” an opaque statement that Clark repeatedly moans throughout the album’s dolorous final track.