MUSIC

Warehouse Live presents Street Dogs. Wreck the Halls 2011 (7th Annual Holiday Tour). With The Broadsiders, Murder the Stout, Roots of Exile, No Resistance.

Tracing the Street Dogs’ story on the eve of the release of their new album, State of Grace, is no easy task. One thing that all parties can agree on is where it all started. At a time when the music scene teems with mediocrity and fashion-oriented bands that are simultaneously from nowhere and of everywhere, maintaining a sense of roots, politics, and place has become the band’s calling card, a way of demonstrating to the world that they most decidedly stand for something.

The Street Dogs, it is somewhat of an understatement to say, are from Boston. Mike McColgan’s name was already indelibly linked with the city, as he had already made his name as the frontman for the Dropkick Murphys, the standard-bearers of Boston punk during the late 1990s. Most musicians dream of achieving that kind of once in a lifetime success. But the Murphys’ rise to fame was something of an entr’acte for the duty-bound McColgan, who had already served in the military prior to forming the band, and who aspired to follow in the footsteps of his uncle and join the Boston Fire Department. So it was that McColgan left the stage for the firehouse in 1998, working over the following years as an EMT and a firefighter.

A funny thing happened on the way back to the firehouse, though. However, upon arriving at a sold-out venue, with lines stretching around the corner, the band realized something was up. It was in a conversation at a truck stop that McColgan and Rioux decided to make the band a full time endeavor.

More than anything else, State of Grace paints the picture of a band that adamantly and unapologetically has things to say. Rather than serving as the closing orations for a punk rock band, the new album serves to put the world on notice that everything up until this point has been little but prologue, and that the story of the Street Dogs begins now.

Bio By: Brendan Kredell.