Klein Zage - Feed the Dog (2022)

Forget what you know about Klein Zage. Her mundanely poetic spoken-word meets outsider-house has reached it’s final form – and it’s almost nothing to do with dance music at all.

Existing in the intersections of alt-pop, trip-hop and shoegaze, the Seattle born, NY based artist has created an evocative collection of songs that balance existential longing with pop sensibility to create a deeply reflective album that elevates the everyday into the celestial.

Each track revels in a sort of serene, catatonic beauty – quietly psychedelic and decidedly cinematic –the album evokes a certain kind of contemplative disassociation. This feeling is echoed on the cover, where we witness Klein Zage frozen, deep in thought - statuesque – pondering life and her environment in a state akin to an out of body experience: This is the precise feeling listening to the album imparts

No stranger to South East London, having previously been based there in the past for a few years, Klein Zage – real name Sage Redman - lands on Rhythm Section INTL with “ Feed the Dog” – part observational realism, part cry for help, part love letter to London.

Klein Zage established herself with previous releases on her own label, Orphan, which she runs with long term collaborator Joey G ii. Her previous work fuses electronic sounds with spoken social commentaries about themes of the city, femininity, and the hospitality industry. The keen eye and the sharp wit prevails, but the final product feels like a total reinvention for Klein Zage in terms of sound and delivery.

Written between Seattle, a remote Washington fjord called Hood Canal, and London, her music covers a lot of ground – sonically speaking. The compositions – whilst clearly evoking dream pop, are fortified with flashes of deconstructed club acoustics that add a contemporary weight to the production.

‘Feed The Dog’ may sound like a transformation of the former Klein Zage sound, but infact this is the music she’s always been making. Her career-long ambitions have come to fruition with these songs, and now seems like a perfect time for people to hear them.

In her own words, Sage says the album “is about the mundane, the routines that tether you to reality, caring for a living breathing being that needs you. Defending the ones you love”. These themes, apart from being a literal ode to her dog Steves, provide a metaphor for a defining moment in Klein’s career as a musician and lyricist.

The intro, ‘Sand’, opens with the sounds of water, taken from field recordings of the Hood Canal fjord. Sonic atmospheres build up with haunting yet hopeful harmonies and long sustained electronic brass and string notes. We are left with the comforting sounds of high tide in the song’s closing moments, signifying the coming and going of care and attention, attachment and release. Zage repeats the incantation, “I’ve convinced myself that this is it”.
Hope confronts despair in the album opener. Is this a turning point or breaking point? The ambiguity persists through the album with lines like “ I am trying to feel”, “ Do I still exist”... This is existentialism at it’s most raw and vulnerable, but the door is always left open…

On ‘Bored With You’, Sage flips the conventional love song on its head, hitting back against the sensational depictions of love. She’s happy to just sit in “augmented silence”, free of unattainable expectations. This song uncovers a crucial truth about romance over the top of swirling synths and lofi drum sounds. We are made aware of the things that exist physically in front of us, rather than an unreal dream of expectation.

The title track is an intricate anthem of life’s mundane joys and comforts and the emotional exchanges of care-giving, full of left field dreaminess and glittering colours. Distant, shoegazey guitar chords, provided by Joey G ii, swell back and forth with eerie electric piano notes. Sage says herself, the project is also about the “tendency to take a back seat in my life - metaphorically feeding the dog while forgetting to feed myself”.

As the project closes we are met with a heartfelt ode to the borough of Lewisham, South East London. A place that is close to Sage and her friends as she sings a lullaby to the ones she’s left behind over metitative synth plucks. This emotional reach back in time hints at some unfinished business from Klein Zage in London, with ‘Feed The Dog’ providing a full-circle moment.

Much like Sage’s metamorphic role as an artist, the overall sound of this record waltzes seamlessly between low tempo pop, filled with rich instrumentation and chorus-soaked guitars, to moving grungy anthems bursting with 80s-inspired energy. Her lyrics provide a poetic remedy to the challenges of everyday life by championing the things we might miss if we are not looking.