Sundogs is a rock group from Seattle, centered around the duo of Stan Snow and Jed Moffitt, and last month they released their second album, Legends In Their Own Minds. An audio visual record, each song has an accompanying video of the band recording it in the studio in front of a green screen, but the songs stand up perfectly well on their own. For many listeners, the album will sound like a time machine which transports you back to the classic rock of the ’70s like Tom Petty and the jazz fusion hybrid of Steely Dan, and the duo finds a unique way to add to the vocabulary of their idols rather than merely imitate them.
With its Rickenbacker guitars, the album opener “Fallen Hero,” is a fitting tribute to Petty, and the band does a fantastic job of respectfully emulating the artist’s signature style. Whether they are rocking with a swagger as on “Already Gone” or quieting things down for a smoother, jazzier number like “Snowman,” the pair excel at finding a hook that sounds like it came from some long lost ’70s pop record that exists in the back of your subconscious. Legends In Their Own Minds might not be a complete reinvention of Sundogs’ influences, but they created something which could have easily existed in the stacks of vinyl somewhere alongside Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton.
