A lot of the songs on Fade Out, the fourth full-length from Halifax’s Dog Day, sound similar, which sometimes makes the album feel like one long song. While this can sometimes be a bummer, most of these songs sound really good, so it’s not. The record feels a lot like its album cover looks, which is dark, deep, and ominous. If Sonic Youth only wrote poppy songs, usually under four minutes long, it might sound a lot like this (interestingly enough, the principal members of the band, Nancy Urich and Seth Smith, are married, which is also something that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore once were). The album is full of heavy hooks and classic rock riffs, which sound badass on tracks like the relentlessly misanthropic “Alone With You.” It drifts into cute-but-sad territory with the lighter “Dirtbag,” in which Smith declares, “I hope that you’ll still be around when I become a better person.” There are (maybe?) some moments of levity, though, such as the hard-rocking driver “Sandwich,” where the only line Urich calls out is “all of my friends are in sandwiches/who am I eating this time?” Dog Day pumps a few lifetimes of emotional crisis into each one of these short tunes, which can be a bit exhausting at times. But it’s also comforting and powerful, somehow. The biggest payoff, and the best song of the record, is the closer, “Before Us.” Over sparse drums and acoustic guitar, Smith sings “as we lay here to rot, it’s not over yet.” On a record so full of sadness, the triumphant light at the end of the tunnel becomes so much more moving than you ever could’ve imagined. It stands above all the tragedy that came before it and pushes forward, with an absurd but necessary amount of hope. (fundog, dogdaymusic.com) Matt Williams