Life writ large isn’t so much cyclical as it is predictable. Good and heady times are invariably followed by the bad and sad, and vice versa, with the transitions often unreeling as if brittle Super 8 film that fails to latch onto a vintage projector’s take-up reel. In the early going, aside from faded colors, everything plays out as expected, with stray hairs and dust pockmarking some memories and absent from others. Out of the blue, however, the picture wobbles and then freezes. You suddenly realize that spilled film has bunched up so much that it’s jamming forward progress.
On his third solo album, Office Culture’s Charlie Kaplan—who handles rhythm guitar here—toggles between shadow and light with the precision of Billy Wilder circa Double Indemnity, though his focus isn’t on torrid crimes but the lurid mindset that lurks just out of frame in much of American life. Joining him on set: Office Culture bandmate Winston Cook-Wilson on keys, Ben Wagner on drums, Frank Meadows of Fust and Tomberlin on bass, and Andrew Daly Frank on lead guitar.
The (proverbial) credits roll on “Sun Comes Up,” an acoustic instrumental that signals what’s to come. “Everyone Calling Your Name,” the next track, shines a spotlight on the imbalance that sometimes accents relationships, while the lyrical minimalism of “Mescarole” explodes into a guitar frenzy by song’s end. “Feelin’ Alright” isn’t the old Dave Mason tune but a look at how some deal with lies and being criticized: by checking out. “Edie Got Away” asks relevant questions—“What is a memory?/What is the point of looking back?”—before making a cutting observation: “Nothing ends/Quite the way it begins.”
“Cloudburst,” for its part, revisits lockdown life, when the world’s revolutions seemed to play out at 78rpm everywhere but in our homes, where the proverbial stylus skipped on the same phrase day after day after day. “Idiot” addresses the narrow-minded who walk among us, while the Dylanesque “Now That I’m Older” morphs writer’s block into the societal block that keeps many of us up at night: “And on and on and on it seems/Haunting my days and haunting my dreams/A frightful sight in bright of day/Now all color seems so gray.”
The album closes with the punk-flavored “In a Little Bit of Time,” which dumps on tinpot despots the world over: “In a little bit of time you will see justice has been served/The arc of history is long; you’re on the wrong side of the curve.” They’re the ones who inevitably believe division and fear leads to victory—and, in truth, sometimes they do. (In the long run, however, I like to think that when a brittle film breaks or stalls, we make a judicious splice and/or tweak the take-up reel, and life plays on, uninterrupted.)
Eternal Repeater is a fine album well worth many spins.
The Old Grey Cat 