Described as a prequel to Sunday, Kaplan’s new record Country Life consists of songs written in the years after graduating college, what he’s described as a ‘lost album’ which again strives to create an ideal present within an otherwise difficult time. “I remember the long hours I spent waiting for my life to start,” as Kaplan explains. “I was restless and impatient. To overcome the stultifying quietude of those days, I peered into the guitar to imagine the types of rooms I’d rather be in: Loud, packed, heaving, sweating singalongs to well-loved songs, friends nearby, lost in the moment. This was the setlist for my theater of the mind.”

Latest single ‘Gas Station Bathroom’ captures the tone of the album. Where existential musings are always balance by wry self-deprecation, and playful energy feels like the most important thing. As though in returning to the songs his younger self had written, Charlie Kaplan re-engages which a youthful energy, and this time he possesses the technical and compositional experience to bring it to life more fully. For all the changes in the interim, and the ambiguity of life itself, the fundamental force at the heart of the work remains unchanged. And again that strange sensation suggests itself—rock music as a kind of immortality.

The concept is in some way mirrored in the track’s imagery. A compulsion for movement and speed which persists beyond functionality. “My dad left me his busted old 97 CR-V when he died and I drove it until pieces started falling out of the bottom of the car onto the highway,” Kaplan explains. “The long, mostly solitary hours I spent tracing I-95 up and down the coast over those years were a sometimes maddening, sometimes revealing stage for examining where my life was going in the wake of that loss. Without knowing where to find terra firma, I was unmoored, untethered, and lost, always moving.”

When a friend pulled me over
With a real hot motor
I’ll tell you what he had to say

He said, “I’m so sick of driving”
He said, “I chased the road, it never ends”
I said, “That’s good enough for some,
But beatable by none”
And let him on his lonely way

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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

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“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 one

I 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

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