Cancel Me (I'm Tired)

Joe Love has described the title track of Fat Dog’s second album as two unrelated ideas colliding: John Lennon’s 1971 “How Do You Sleep?” – a diss track aimed at a specific former bandmate – crossed with an imagined version of Anatolian psych-rock revivalists Altın Gün getting overrun by a thumping club beat. On paper that’s two genres and one grudge that have no obvious business occupying the same three and a half minutes. On record, “Cancel Me (I’m Tired)” commits to the collision rather than smoothing it over: a wiry, minor-key guitar line that could plausibly open a 1970s Turkish psych record gets steadily buried under rave synths and a four-on-the-floor pulse, while Love delivers the entire lyric in a flat, exhausted deadpan that refuses to sell the joke any harder than it needs to be sold.

And the joke itself is the plainest kind of premise: a man asking, with visible sincerity, to be cancelled – not because he’s done anything in particular, but because he’s tired, and cancellation has apparently become easier to request than rest. The accompanying video, shot by director James Winstanley on an actual night out in London’s Soho, follows the band trying and failing to get themselves cancelled by the public in real time, which is a funnier and more specific bit than most songs built around a culture-war punchline manage. Where a lesser version of this idea would coast entirely on the premise, Love and the band keep escalating the arrangement underneath it – the rave elements get louder and more chaotic as the song goes, until the deadpan delivery and the increasingly unhinged production are visibly pulling in opposite directions, which is a more interesting choice than just picking one tone and staying there.

That tension is Fat Dog’s whole method, not a one-song trick: a seven-piece band built to refuse a single genre, splitting the difference between the mosh pit and the club rather than picking a side. “Cancel Me (I’m Tired)” earns its own version of the burnout it’s joking about – it’s a song about being too exhausted to keep performing an identity, performed by a band that’s clearly having a great time refusing to settle on one. The humor does most of the heavy lifting, which caps how seriously the song can be taken as a composition, but the deadpan-over-chaos structure is genuinely well-built, not just a bit stretched over a beat.

7.0/10 – a culture-war punchline with real craft underneath it, delivered by a band more interested in staying weird than in being right.

Hero image: “Cancel Me (I’m Tired)” single/album cover art, Domino Recording Co. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.