Album Review – Spiel by Office Dog (2024) (New West Records / Flying Nun Records)
Office Dog is the new project of Kane Strang (on guitar and vocals), who has previously collaborated with notable labels such as Dead Oceans, Flying Nun Records, and Ba Da Bing Records in his solo capacity, and who is joined in a full-band format by Rassani Tolovaa on bass and Mitchell Innes on drums.
As Kiwi in musical texture as it possibly gets, this superb Spiel debut album resonates within three definitive nuances. Initially, tracks best represented by Shade, Antidote, and Hand in Hand are augmented by the subtle dulcet persuasions that has been emphasized in so many Flying Nun Records acts over the preceding four decades, while simultaneously adding flourishes of Zac Denton-style lo-fi jangle rock into the aesthetic.
Such lo-tempo tracks are also joined by Warmer and Cut the Ribbon, which are genuinely gorgeous, sedate guitar-pop tracks that provide a beautifully pretty ying to the yang of an album that generally feels typically ‘antipodean masculine’.
However, undoubtedly the most memorable tracks of the album are when Office Dog ‘let go’. Here, Big Air with its mid 2000S Postcard Records revival essence and the crushed jangly noise rock of Gleam and The Crater rock with an insistence that shudders straight through the core of the release with undiluted energy.
A genuinely assured debut album, grab your copy on vinyl, CD or digital here.
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