(2019) Office Culture - A Life of Crime
Review:
On their second album of sardonic soft rock, Office Culture stage a doomed venture into the big city. Deals are brokered, schemes devised, savings drained; love withers and melodies teeter; everything, it seems, is collapsing together. The title is A Life of Crime. Maybe the crime is stealing time back from the metropolis, or not scamming hard enough. The city sounds exhausting, the band thrilled to be there. When Office Culture recorded their debut, I Did the Best I Could, in 2017, the Brooklyn outfit was building on the scrappy solo demos of Winston Cook-Wilson, a songwriter and journalist. The follow-up’s lavishness suits him: Office Culture at large sound clumsy yet suave, as if honoring the social imperative to project extravagance while scrambling to get by. A Life of Crime toys with this and other modern ironies, not least in its palette of schmoozey lounge jazz for jittery loners. Flirtatious licks sneak beyond the songs’ borders and into illicit fifth bars. Synths gouge space from under the vocals, Cook-Wilson crooning and pirouetting like a drunk trespasser in the Hamptons. The vocals are theatrical, the sophistipop textures faintly ludicrous. But what might scan as faux sincerity transpires to be heartfelt affect, perhaps with an air of class performance. Money isn’t a theme of the record so much as the water in which its characters swim. Some of Cook-Wilson’s sharpest lyrics are relationship riddles that riff on the deceptions of the free market, like the whirlwind romance styled as a “Ponzi scheme for two” on “Monkey Bone.” His transactional wordplay gestures toward a millennial quandary: the way precarious living conditions and hyper-monetization test our faith in love, too. As received wisdom lets our industries fail and planet burn, why cling to any old myths at all? Drift and instability trickle from the lyrics down into the music, tilting schmaltz into the realm of the uncanny. Hovering between Talk Talk bliss and the netherworld of Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter is “Diamonds,” a Silicon Valley satire over a morass of slap bass and brass. “A Sign” is so smooth it haunts, somehow suggesting a sax solo that isn’t there. It’s sleek music for a cursed place, opulent like a ritzy hotel lounge. Given its soft-rock lineage, A Life of Crime could probably bluff through a shift on the strip-mall speakers, but it pitches to the nerds and crate-diggers, by turns summoning the Blue Nile, Gaucho-era Steely Dan, and the Destroyer of Kaputt. “Diamonds” delights in antic concepts and cadences (“Munching on that crudité…. pogo-sticking ’round the Valley”), though where a songwriter like Dan Bejar would exude playful self-assurance, Office Culture’s camp feels desperate to please, as if Cook-Wilson were a bumped-up understudy for some less florid singer. His vocal calligraphy might be overbearing were it not for the luminous backdrop, where no note is wasted and economy is king. The result, a jaunt around the urban imagination, could scarcely be better company. Like cigar-jacket city pop or a penthouse Postcard Records, the music charms as it pontificates, swept up in the alchemy whereby songs redeem otherwise terrible places. On the right backstreet, a tune like “Hard Times in the City” could exorcise an abandoned building and make its ghosts sing, elevate the dive bars and the loneliness we take there. For all its intricacies, A Life of Crime plays like a half-remembered travelogue, comprising diary entries from the cities you passed through while finding your way home. How far we can drift, it muses, even when it feels like we’re sinking.
Media Report:
Genre: indie-pop, soft rock
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Track Listing:
1.A Sign 05:01
2.Hard Times in the City 03:29
3.Diamonds 05:04
4.I Move in Shadows 04:10
5.Home on High 04:14
6.Too Many 03:29
7.Parade 02:43
8.Monkey Bone 05:51
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