Is Keanu Reeves’ band actually good? I can’t write this review without first addressing the elephant in the room. Or without perhaps making this entire piece about just that – let’s see how we get on.
I could sum up Dogstar’s sound somewhat reductively as sunny California driving music, good for beers with the bros by the beach. Good for miserable Manchester? If you’re counting down the days to your holiday, wind down the windows, stick on ‘Blonde’ and let me know if it translates better for you than it did for me during my rainy morning commute.
As the lights dimmed and Keanu himself jogged across the stage, throwing a silent wave to the crowd, the audience became a sea of phone cameras. It took about 20 minutes for someone to yell ‘No, you’re breathtaking!” at the celebrity, who responded by staring blankly in the heckler’s general direction.
It isn’t difficult to imagine a plague of Hollywood reporters rushing into the building to snap the latest cool shots of rock’s new daddy and screaming fans having seen a few big films and listened to exactly zero Dogstar tunes. Hell, that’s not so far removed from myself.
Obviously, when Bret introduced the band, Keanu got the loudest screams.
As for their performance, Dogstar were … fine. With no backing vocals and minimal movement on stage, short songs and guitar solos pinned after the second choruses in each track, it was very much a case of ‘What you see is what you get.” It was the kind of inoffensive rock show that 80s dad-rock fans like to call “Hardcore, bro!” With the show’s stripped-back nature and relatively low production value (lights, sound and the band), I could describe the show as raw, if we choose to ignore the very pricey looking guitars and amp models they used. Credit where credit is due, Keanu used a beat-up bass stack that could have (and probably did) come straight from a struggling actor’s post-industrial living room.
I certainly felt that the hype died away as the mums in leather jackets began to realise that Dogstar were in fact a band and not simply a starstruck slideshow of the prolific actor – Keanu himself did not have a microphone, and it was instead frontman Bret Domrose who handled the lowkey speeches between tracks.
A positive point is that Dogstar, perhaps even to their detriment, are a passion project. These three guys love the music they play. It isn’t exactly boundary pushing and their performance could have been more dynamic, but there is something to be said for an A-list celebrity bringing his teen rock band around the world just because he loves to play his bass guitar with his best friends.
Would Dogstar be as big as they are if it wasn’t for Keanu Reeves’ fame? Would half of the people in that room have gone to the show if they didn’t know who he was? I read on Wikipedia that their original name was ‘Small Fecal Matter’. I’m not usually a cynic, but I’m going to assume not.
I bought a shirt anyway.