Though starting life as the solo project of the writer and musician Winston Cook-Wilson, Office Culture has grown into a full band, with Ian Wayne (guitar/keyboards), Charlie Kaplan (bass), and Pat Kelly (drums) lending their talents to the cause. Led by Cook-Wilson’s piano and with one eye on the golden era of jazz-inspired easy-listening, the band make what is ostensibly a brand of smooth-rock/sophistipop, though the style is far from an exercise in empty nostalgia or pastiche.
“People often consider music with a ‘smooth’ aesthetic to be insincere and aspirational,” Cook-Wilson explains. “For me, jazzier textures and harmonies are a natural way for me to express myself and create a mood commensurate with the content of the songs, whether that is bittersweet, satirical, and—as a lot of this album ended up being, somehow—acutely personal and sad.”
The band’s second album, set for release on Whatever’s Clever in November, A Life of Crime is the perfect example of this, channeling the spirits of Donald Fagen, Warren Zevon and even early Tom Waits to create a sound imbued with a playful spirit that’s able to retain a genuine sincerity and emotion too. Furthermore, despite drawing upon such figures, the Office Culture style is very much its own beast, a singular, twenty-first century take on the smooth sound that acknowledges its influences without wishing to become them. “I hope we’ve created something that feels more than nostalgic,” Cook-Wilson continues, “that encourages people to meet it on its own terms rather than slot it into a category.”
Today we’re delighted to share ‘Hard Times in the City’, the first single from A Life of Crime and the track which most directly inspired the album. The song is based upon a stereotypical scene of the reluctant criminal, that moment of a thousand movies where a regretful figure leaves their life behind, fleeing for their freedom as the net begins to tighten, all incriminating evidence locked tight in the trunk. The banality of the situation is indicative of the city in which it was born, where desperation is not some primal emotion of violence or sex but the hot drafts of computer towers, the abstract numbers, the unseen determinants of life’s value and success.
The system is breaking down
Wanted to sell those final shares but the devil got ’em now
I called when I was halfway out of town
and I did the calculations, no one wins this oneI thought that this old house would fix itself
but it just sank a foot in the ground
and the bills went the other way
Hard time in the city, babe.
Photo by Max Heimberger