With a pair of solo albums and years of related touring under his belt by the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Zealand songwriter
Kane Strang found himself under a national Level Four lockdown alert in his hometown of Dunedin in early 2020. That May, he released a solo demo called "Standstill," and around the time he was able to perform live again in 2021, he relocated to Auckland with an eye toward doing something more collaborative. His touring drummer and former bass player fit the bill and, with the latter relocating to Auckland to join the rest of the power trio, they spent the next year working up songs together. The resulting 12- track
Spiel falls in the vicinity of
Strang's melancholier second solo LP,
Two Hearts and No Brain (2017) while sculpting a sound that commits more fully to angsty, '90 lo-fi inspirations, with a weightier guitar palette and discontented lyrics to match. Introductory track "Shade" begins with the languid repeated guitar riff before
Strang's double-tracked vocal enters with the words, "Face to face in the maze." A fuzzy distortion drop accompanies a brisker tempo as part of a snarling, more aggressive, arena rock-like passage to close the brief scene-setter. Across grungy entries like the narcotic "Antidote" and pounding "Gleam" and more spacious, noodly tracks such as "Hand in Hand" and the gentler "Cut the Ribbon,"
Strang's strong, Dunedin-bred melodic sensibility remains intact. While just about everything here is darkly anxious yet engaging, highlights include the line ¿Life's just time chasing your mind with the body you get" (from "In the Red") and the bouncy, utterly infectious "Big Air," which, in keeping with the rest of the album, adds injury to elation: "I got big air/Flew and landed strange." ~ Marcy Donelson
