Blank Dogs make the familiar unfamiliar. For instance, we have seen these elaborate PR tactics before: one man posing, at least in name, as a band, but with studiously guarded anonymity. But the web unearthed a name and pieced together a back-story, and Mike Sniper has been outed as the mastermind behind the project. A walking Wikipedia of music arcana, he played guitar in the New Jersey punk outfit D.C. Snipers, hawks rarities at the Academy Annex record shop in Williamsburg, hand-crafts gig posters and t-shirts, and set up both the power-pop-reissue label Radio Heartbeat and, more recently, the Captured Tracks imprint. His art has colonized every corner of his life. For anyone tempted to paint Sniper as a bandwagon-jumper, chasing some kind of hipper-than-thou low fidelity trend, one glance at this CV would straighten them out.