Another tie to CD-era nostalgia? Enough is the first Office Culture release that works best as a headphones album, its arrangements bubbling with curious, disembodied samples and off-center backing vocals that are only discernible upon close listen. “Around It” seems like a relatively sparse mantra of love and belonging, but listen with headphones in a quiet environment and you’ll catch all these counter-harmonies and eccentric vocal snippets whirring about in the right channel, as though the song were being remixed in real time. And if not every experiment lands—if “Imabeliever” strains Cook-Wilson’s vocal range and “Beach Friday” feels a little too fussily arranged and cheesily prone to nautical metaphors—maybe that also fits with the theme of CD-era bloat, of not holding anything back.
Enough seems to be a breakup album, though not the self-pitying kind, and not the embittered, scorched-earth kind either—that’s not this band’s style. Cook-Wilson is more prone to wry, wordplay-inflected interrogations on where it all went wrong and why. “Where I Can’t Follow” movingly evokes the pain of sensing a partner drift apart from you, with Charlie Kaplan’s supple bass licks anchoring Cook-Wilson’s bummed prognostications (“You’ll go somewhere/And I won’t follow/I can’t follow you”).
Meanwhile, the six-minute centerpiece “Open Up Your Fist” is heavier and stormier than anything Office Culture have done before, with lyrics that probe a relationship’s demise like a courtroom drama (“Sit back and let me hear it/I’ll close out my defense/This is the background we cast the good times against”). And the disarmingly wise ballad “Was I Cruel” flips its titular question into a stirring meditation on guilt and forgiveness and how easy it is to mistake cruelty for honesty in a doomed relationship: “I can’t believe destructiveness felt that much like truth,” Cook-Wilson sings. The song is surprisingly theatrical—not in the hokey, showtunes-y sense, but in its knack for detail and emotion, how easily you can imagine one character crooning it to another in a scrappy off-Broadway show.
Where previous Office Culture albums were charmingly insular, Enough buzzes with a sense of community, situating the group within a larger sphere of hyper-literate and jazz-loving New York musicians. With its myriad guests, the album makes Office Culture feel more like a loose collective than a clearly defined band. Spanger returns to sing lead on the sputtering, mournful “Secluded”; the Bird Calls (aka songwriter and former Pitchfork staffer Sam Sodomsky) gets a spotlight on the title track, a nostalgic elegy; and Jackie West (whose recent LP Close to the Mystery has marked her as another ambitious Brooklyn songwriter on the rise) wrings plaintive melodies out of the jazzily disheveled “Everything,” which also serves as the album’s curtain call.
