B-Side Guys

Behind every cold bureaucratic system lurks the potential for unexpected cruelty. The Taxpayers return from their multi-year hiatus with “At War With The Dogcatchers,” a razor-sharp indictment of institutional callousness wrapped in a story of unlikely hope.

This latest single from their upcoming album “Circle Breaker” demonstrates how the Portland experimental punk veterans have spent their time away from the spotlight. The band’s signature genre-bending approach takes on new emotional depth as they tackle a narrative about a friend’s dog nearly being euthanized by animal control after its owner’s death – a “salt in the wound” moment that exposes the machinery of bureaucratic indifference.

The track sits comfortably within the album’s broad emotional spectrum, somewhere between the furious chaos of “I Am One Thousand” and the stripped vulnerability of “Nobody is a Lost Cause.” This positioning feels appropriate for a song that searches for meaning in broken things while acknowledging the systems that break them.

Rob Taxpayer’s songwriting captures the absurd cruelty of marking a grieving dog for death because of its perfectly natural reaction to trauma. That the story ends with hope – both in the song’s narrative and in real life, where “that’s how we ended up with a dog” – suggests resistance isn’t futile, even against the most rigid systems.

Coming from a band that’s weathered its own share of tragic events during their hiatus, “At War With The Dogcatchers” feels like more than just storytelling. It’s a declaration that love can prevail against cold institutional logic, that broken things deserve defenders, and that sometimes the best revenge against a cruel system is simply to care more deeply than it does.