Photo: Violet Hirst
On his Facebook page this week, local musician Kane Strang mentioned “going through the ringer a bit” in regards to his solo output.
Originally from Dunedin, he started a decade ago with a collection of demos recorded barely out of his teens, followed it with two albums released on American labels, then in 2021 a notably more angular independent LP.
It must have felt like a lot of pressure for someone in their twenties, and Strang has been open about wanting to collaborate, presumably to get out of his own head a bit when it came to making music. Which brings us to his new band Office Dog, who just released their debut album Spiel on Flying Nun, with songwriting credits split between its three members.
‘Big Air’ is one of the more jaunty things here, bopping over a ‘Lust For Life’-type tom shuffle; jagged chords blending with Strang’s laidback delivery.
His early lyrics could be self-deprecating and confessional, but that’s faded over the years into something more evocative. “I can’t feel nobody else”, goes one line, “I can’t feel no pain”.
That song evokes the poppier end of his indie rock output, but mostly the album tends toward the slightly more gothic sound of his last solo outing. ‘Tightropes' operates on a minimum of chords and a vocal melody that’s just one note (and somehow still catchy), before an acoustic guitar enters and the track cascades outward.
Spiel was written communally, with bassist Rassani Tolovaa and drummer Mitchell Innes, over a year or so. Fragments eventually became songs, according to the liner notes, and the results feel less constrained than Strang did last time around.
There’s a looseness to something like ‘Cut the Ribbon’, which interrupts acoustic fingerpicking with rock riffs, the rhythm section dependently throbbing when required.
There’s a bit of propulsion there, but most tracks fall into a mid-tempo groove, with Strang’s vocals appropriately disaffected. He’s often restrained in terms of range and melody, but ones like ‘In the Red’ show he can push up an octave and into a falsetto.
On the title track Strang sings “Sorry for the spiel”, showing he still has some self-deprecation in the tank. It’s an album from someone who’s refined their craft over ten years - I’m particularly taken with his vocals, which are treated and mixed to feel fuzzy and warm - and pushes into new territory thanks to the writing split with Tolovaa and Innes. Really there’s nothing to apologize for.
