Enough

The double album is enjoying a cultural revival lately, a defiant rejoinder to attention-deficit audiences hooked on shortform media. The bug is contagious; over the last few years, artists as varied as Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and lo-fi iconoclast Cindy Lee have leaned into their expansive impulses, pressing-plant delays be damned.

Still, I never expected Office Culture to partake in this maximalist tradition. The Brooklyn soft-rock project, led by writer and musician Winston Cook-Wilson, the kind of guy who gets quoted in trend pieces about millennials embracing Steely Dan, hit its stride on 2019’s A Life of Crime and 2022’s Big Time Things, wonderfully out-of-time albums that thrived on a certain quixotic intimacy. With Cook-Wilson’s suave voice, melodic talent, and affection for sophistipop elegance guiding the way, they were small-scale albums about big-time things; self-contained releases that seemed designed to be enjoyed in one sitting.

But as anyone who’s read his reviews (including for this website, where he has been an occasional contributor) can attest, Cook-Wilson’s musical interests extend beyond a certain constellation of soft-rock classics released between 1975 and 1988. Enough is the proof. It’s a 73-minute double album that swaps Office Culture’s jazzy stylings for sample-speckled art-pop and nocturnal brooders, replete with guest spots and stylistic left turns. The lurching, distorted rhythmic inkblots that open “Hat Guy” signal that this is a new kind of Office Culture record; once the track settles into a loungy funk groove, though, with Cook-Wilson crooning self-effacing vignettes about a love gone stale, it’s clear that the band’s songwriting acumen remains very much intact.

The singer drew influence from what might ungenerously be called CD-era bloat—those sprawling, 70-plus-minute discs from the ’90s and early aughts, loaded with genre-mingling ambition and an anything-goes spirit. That explains why Enough is so wide-ranging, and why it has a more pronounced hip-hop, electronica, and trip-hop influence than the group’s past work, with wobbly beats underlining the falsetto hooks of “Imabeliever” and a reggaeton rhythm coursing through “We Used to Build Things” as it shifts from programmed beats to live instrumentation. It also explains why the remarkable lead single “Counting Game” opens with grainy loops that seem transplanted from a late ’90s Massive Attack B-side before morphing into a spectral duet of sorts between Cook-Wilson and fellow Brooklyn singer-songwriter Alena Spanger, who intones random-seeming numbers more eerily than anyone has reeled off digits since Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach.

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.

That community also includes Ruination Record Co., the scrappy label that’s putting out the record, and whose co-founder, musician Dan Knishkowy (aka Adeline Hotel), plays guitar on several tracks here. If Office Culture’s breakout album, A Life of Crime, was preoccupied with the lonely indignities of life in the big city, this one is enriched by its eventual rewards: building a community of artists and weirdos, a network of over-talented and under-employed peers who can help bring your creative dreams to life.