Review: The Dollyrots – “Down the Rabbit Hole”

Wicked Cool – 21 JAN 2022

With their b-sides, rarities, and covers collection, The Dollyrots show off how much fun even their deep cuts can be.

I’ve never been a huge fan of B-sides and rarities collections.  My feeling is that, if the songs were any good, they would have been included on a studio album in the first place.  However, that’s hardly the case with The Dollyrots on Down the Rabbit Hole, which is bursting with so much sugary pop-punk fun that even this collection of very deep cuts is likely to give you a cavity (but in, like, a good way).  Plus if you’re not interested in hearing the band’s B-sides and alternate takes of songs you’ve heard before, there’s a whole second disc to this album that’s just the covers that the band has released over the years, most of them as stand-alone digital singles.  So, unlike most of these kinds of compilation albums that feel like filler to hold you over until the next studio album, Down the Rabbit Hole serves as a retrospective that reminds you how much fun The Dollyrots have always been.

Songs like “Too Fun For My Health” and “Just Like All the Rest” are such pop-punk fun that you’ll wonder how they never made it onto an album before now.  That being said, not everything is a heaping dose of sunshine: “Cloud Ten,” “Vibration,” and “Super Mega Ultraviolet” are all best described as a dessert that’s sweet but not too sweet as vocalist/bassist Kelly Ogden adopts more of a Garbage-esque, pop-goth vibe on some of these tracks. The alternative “Dark Version” of the band’s standalone single “Get Radical” better compliments the song’s dark feminist/political lyrics than the original. And the adorable nerd love song “Be My Leia,” which originally appeared on the band’s acoustic album, Love Songs, Werewolves & Zombies, gets an electric makeover that really punches up the energy without losing any of the charm of the original.

Okay, but as great as The Dollyrots’ original tunes are, I’m way more excited to talk about disc two, the cover songs.  Admittedly, several of these songs fall victim to the cardinal sin of cover songs: playing the cover too close to the original, but some of them have a particularly Dollyrot spin on them.  First up is a cover of my favorite Nirvana song, “Breed,” which The Dollyrots recently covered for the 30^th anniversary of Nevermind.  This isn’t a song I would expect a pop-punk band to be able to pull off, and they didn’t do too much to differentiate it from the original, but there is a certain but slight pop lightness to the cover that Kurt Cobain never would have put in his own music.

The cover of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” sounds probably exactly like you expected a pop-punk version of that song to sound, but now that you’re thinking about it, don’t you want to hear a pop-punk version of that song?  Covering “High School Never Ends” by The Dollyrots’ friends and frequent touring partners, Bowling for Soup, comes from a split EP where the two bands covered each other. But, for all the good points the song makes, it sure is dated.  Then there’s the medley that combines three songs with strikingly similar beats:  The Crystals’ 60’s R&B hit “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Do the Sponge” from Spongebob Squarepants, and of course The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated,” with each successive song even more fun than the one before it.

The Queers‘ “Punk Rock Girls” is a song that could possibly come off as objectifying if it were rooted more in lust than it is in flirty innocence, and it helps that it’s a pretty obvious thematic parody of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls.”  The objectifying elements get softened a little when you switch the gender of the singer from male to female, which is pretty easy to do as Kelly Ogden has never shown any qualms about singing love songs to people with she/her pronouns or about taking on the role of a male speaker in a song she’s singing.  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers‘ “American Girl” translates into a punk song a bit more easily than you probably would expect, and The Dollyrots have a lot of fun with it.  “Earth Angel” and “Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)” are doo-wop classics that also translate easily to punk with their simple pop structures.

The Dollyrots celebrate 20 years as a band this year and this collection contains cuts from all throughout the band’s 20 year history. It’s better than most projects of this nature, and it’s a great way to celebrate with them. The Dollyrots find themselves poised for another 20 years if they want it, with the band—which consists of a married couple and a never-ending, rotating lineup of Spinal Tap drummers—likely to go on for as long as Kelly Ogden and Luis Cabezas continue to not get sick of each other… and I don’t know how anyone can get sick of The Dollyrots.