Past Dog Beach - Empty

​Past Dog Beach

Empty
self-released; 2026

By Jamie Funk
​

Past Dog Beach’s EMPTY pairs straightforward, melodic songwriting with a deliberately rough-edged DIY production style. Across its two tracks, jangling guitars, steady rhythms, and heavily treated vocals give the release a homemade character, while the hooks keep the songs immediate and easy to settle into. Across two songs, the Detroit project favors jangling guitars, steady rhythms, and a thick wash of reverb that gives the music a dreamy, homemade quality without pushing fully into shoegaze. To my ears, these are accessible songs with a clear DIY production aesthetic, and while their arrangements are fairly restrained, there is enough melodic instinct here to make both tracks immediately likable.

Past Dog Beach began as a solo project from Keith Christmas on the Big Island of Hawaii before relocating to Detroit, Michigan. Working with various musicians, Christmas has continued developing a catalog that pulls from post-punk, psychedelia, and what the project describes as Bohemian Gothic. EMPTY, the latest release, contains two songs that share nearly identical production choices and a similarly subdued approach to arrangement.

“Empty” opens with a lo-fi jangling guitar before bass and drums gradually settle into the mix. Nearly everything is coated in reverb, giving the song a hazy, shoegaze-adjacent character, although the underlying composition itself is considerably more straightforward. Strummed chords and a basic 4/4 beat provide most of the foundation. I can’t say it is particularly complex from a technical standpoint, but the melodies are catchy enough that complexity hardly feels like the point.

The song maintains roughly the same groove throughout its four-plus-minute runtime, with few dramatic changes in dynamics or texture. Most of the movement happens in smaller increments. The final section, for example, becomes slightly more intense without substantially altering the arrangement. The guitar and bass occasionally reminded me of Real Estate, particularly in the way the instruments create a relaxed sense of forward motion without demanding much attention from themselves. The vocal delivery works well too and, at moments, brought Morrissey to mind. That said, the amount of hall reverb surrounding the voice tends to smooth over some of its finer details, reducing the small variations in phrasing and articulation that might otherwise give the performance more personality.

“Sorrow” operates within almost exactly the same sonic environment. There is just as much reverb here, along with what sounds like a phase effect moving through parts of the mix. The song is pleasant and undeniably pretty, but the density of the effects makes the lyrics difficult to understand. Again, the arrangement avoids any major transition or structural disruption. A great song overall. 

As an engineer myself, I have to admit I would have approached the mixes somewhat differently. Pulling back some of that ambience could have allowed the vocals and individual instrumental performances to feel more defined. At the same time, I really enjoyed the songs themselves, and I thought the vocals were particularly well delivered. There's certainly no one way to mix a song just a preference. 

EMPTY ultimately succeeds on melody and mood rather than dramatic songwriting shifts or elaborate musicianship. These are two well-made songs with a cohesive identity that worked really well. There is enough here to suggest that Past Dog Beach has a distinctive aesthetic taking shape, and I look forward to hearing where the project takes it next. Great songs - take a listen!

pastdogbeach.com

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