“Beige Hell” opens with a shout of its own title, then a laugh and an oops, and Dog Pops kept all of it on the record. That stumble is the right front door for a song whose narrator admits in the first verse that the anger boiling up over a housing development is out of all proportion. The band plays garage punk with the loose ends left loose, and Dog Pops have summed the song up as an argument that suburbs are dumb.
The joke is how airtight that argument turns out to be. Once the snarl settles, the verses read like testimony at a city planning meeting. The narrator wants to know where anyone walks when a neighborhood has no sidewalks, and where anyone shops when it has no stores, which is the standard case against single-use zoning, the rules that keep homes and businesses in separate districts so every errand requires a car. Then comes the housing stock, sneered at as a choice made “amidst the four designs of house,” a line that shrinks an entire development down to a builder’s catalog. Driveways and garages drag the narrator down too, a funny complaint from a genre that got its name from teenage bands rehearsing in suburban garages in the 1960s.
The final grievance is the widest one: there is nowhere to go to build a community. With no shared place to gather, the band turns the outro into a farewell tour, bidding goodbye to Bridgwater and Sage Creek, two real subdivisions on the southern edge of Winnipeg, and to every neighborhood built on the same plan.
That laugh in the first seconds works as the band’s disclaimer, a way of conceding that hating beige houses is a little ridiculous. The case underneath holds up anyway, and Dog Pops drive out of town with the stronger argument and the catchier chorus.
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