Pat Kelly is perhaps best known as the drummer for Brooklyn outfit Office Culture, who released their latest album, A Life of Crime, back in November on Whatever’s Clever. But Kelly makes music under his own name too, intimate finger-picked guitar songs that feel humble and restrained compared to Office Culture’s smooth jazz-inflected stylings.
Today Kelly is announcing his third album, titled Creatures, which is getting a special cassette release by Ruination Record Co. Taking the basic aesthetic blueprint of the likes of David Berman and Bill Callahan, Kelly creates something unique by incorporating the moreish earworm melodies of pop songwriters like Harry Nilsson and Roy Orbison. The record isn’t just a simple solo endeavour either. Office Culture bandmate Winston Cook-Wilson adds keyboard and backing vocals (as well as handling production and engineering), and Andy Cush (Garcia Peoples) plays bass.
Most songs on the album are over within three minutes, and unlike many songwriters, Kelly forgoes melodramatic introspection in favour of wry narratives, focusing on a community of characters rather than Kelly himself. “Pithy one-liners and nuggets of wisdom leap out,” says the album blurb, “but they often come from an assorted cast of unreliable narrators: misanthropes, eccentrics, or unassuming working stiffs searching for simple pleasures in the subtle variations of their life routines.”
We have the pleasure of presenting the album’s title track and lead single, ‘Creatures’, a song which captures the aesthetic and wider themes of the album. Here easy guitar and subtle percussion juxtapose against the mundane dread of the narrator’s stasis, particularly around his fruitless search for employment. “I’m looking for a job,” he begins in typically deadpan fashion, “but there’s no-one I can call, no references no history at all.”
The song also hints at another of Pat Kelly’s signature moves, using references to horror and sci-fi as manifestations of the routine terrors of everyday life. “The spiritual demons of modern society often become real ones,” describes the blurb, “casting oppressive shadows over his characters as they try to remember more carefree times.” In this case it conjures images of the shadowy figures who hold an unseen control over our lives, figures not with claws and fangs but silk ties and cuff-links.
Creatures in the night, unspeakable appetites
keep your slimy fingers out of sight