by Niccolo Porcello (@niccoloporcello)
Doggerland, a followup to early 2024’s remarkable LP Spiel, finds Office Dog in expansive form, redefining and shifting the heavy hitting hooks of Spiel into equally exhilarating territory. Spiel, their audacious full length debut from January of this year, is a masterclass in dynamics-driven Ovlov-ian rock, walloping and shimmering, in alternate turns cathartic and tactile. Office Dog make some of the most rawly beautiful noise rock I’ve heard in quite some time. Fronted by Kane Strang’s outstanding, mesmerizing voice, the trio builds layers of complexity on simple bones, a formula that can be tweaked and rehashed ad infinitum without losing anything. Where Spiel often hews to a distinct palate, Doggerland paints a slightly more robust sonic landscape while still having the ineffable momentum the trio is so adept at building.
The opening track “Nancy” is a perfect encapsulation of the magic trick Office Dog pull off; Strang’s twisting guitar leads the way, but Rassani Tolovaa’s bass lines orbit and punch, and Mitchell Innes’ drumming serves as the load-bearing beam behind it all. “Dump No Waste, Flows to the Sea” opens uncharacteristically acoustic, feinting something ballad-esque before slowly opening and expanding into wall of sound, over repeated wails of “dump no waste/ cause it flows to the sea.” Like so many of Strang’s lyrics, “Dump No Waste…” elegantly navigates the Anthropocene and the wholesale consumption of everyone and everything.
That palpable lyricism in Strang’s haptic songwriting threads the first two Office Dog releases together. On Spiel, there are repeated uses of simple environmental nouns; mist, shade, sun, night, day, wind, land, sea, and shell feature among others. On Doggerland, swim, crest, sand, sunbeam, wave, cloud, and rain are all here. “Dump no waste/ cause it flows to the sea” is a delightful paean, almost functioning as a self-referential easter egg toward their larger oeuvre. Although on first listens it seems like a simple conceit, there is something tethering and vivid about Strang’s brutalist descriptions of nature. Again and again, his songs contemplate the inextricable relationship humans have to the surrounding environment, whether subsumptive or consumptive.
Elsewhere on “The Surface,” Office Dog takes a downright Swings-ian go at it, threatening to wholly unravel without ever doing so. Strang’s guitar laps at the rhythm section, building tension with an aquatic relentlessness. Similarly, “June” lets Strang lead the way before the trio jazzily coalesce into a gargantuan swell, with Innes unrelentingly driving the band forward. It is hard to overstate how delicately Office Dog are loud; they are incredibly adept at creating an architecture of sound that sneaks up on you, towering, slightly ominous, but never unrefined.
“And Everything” is maybe the most Spiel-y track on Doggerland. Meandering and considered in the opening verses, “And Everything” shimmers and swirls around double tracked guitar, as Tolovaa and Innes gently turn up the heat, before a roiling cacophony over which Strang admits: “Just me and everything/ Just me and everything/ Just me and everything/ And/ every night I tried/ To build a bridge/ Right back to everything”. Isn’t that just so.