Enough by Office Culture

Winston Cook-Wilson had a dream about a pelican. It was on the cover of Enough, the sprawling and spectacular fourth album by his art-pop band Office Culture, a record that did not yet exist in waking life at the time. He soon set about making it real. The pelican was important in some obscure way to the music that followed, but perhaps more important was the album’s format. This was a CD, not a slab of vinyl. He’d already been thinking about the ‘90s, both in terms of the sounds of the era—how genres with underground roots like rap, industrial, and rave mutated and hybridized with the mainstream at a time when pop’s possibilities felt boundless—and also about how artists used the CD’s expansive runtime to craft albums whose durations are central to their intoxicating effect.

Those thoughts came to influence the final form of Enough, Office Culture’s most ambitious album: 16 songs, 73 minutes. Some stretch out like extended soliloquies, never returning to the same material twice. Others are alternate-universe pop hits, banging and (relatively) compact. The arrangements were culled from sessions with his bandmates Charlie Kaplan (bass) and Ryan El-Solh (guitar), along with 21 other collaborators, then stitched together painstakingly on Winston’s laptop, blending electronics and live instrumentation in such a way that you’re often unsure which is which. And yes, there is a pelican on the cover.

Listeners who are familiar with Winston’s previous work—solo, with Office Culture, or as an increasingly prolific producer whose recent credits include co-production on Alena Spanger’s acclaimed Fire Escape—may be surprised at the brief recounting of ‘90s reference points above. He is sometimes pegged, uneasily, as a specialist in 21st-century takes on sophistipop and smooth rock, misunderstood genres of the ‘70s and ‘80s whose fusions of jazz harmony with dance-club rhythms and classic pop forms do bear some relationship to his past work, but can’t begin to wholly account for his rich idiosyncrasy as a songwriter.

No one would hear Enough and remark that it sounds like Steely Dan. Winston’s harmonic approach to the keyboard, full of aqueous and shimmering suspended chords, is still central, but the sounds that surround it are almost entirely new. Where to begin? “We Used to Build Things” has spooky choral samples and drum machines playing tiny dembow rhythms. The giant groove of “Like I Was Different” splits the difference between Can and the Chemical Brothers. You hear the lurching intro to “Counting Game” and half-expect a member of Wu-Tang to start rapping over it. That’s only scratching the surface.

To Winston’s friends and collaborators, he is an encyclopedic source of knowledge and enthusiasm about music, whose taste runs far beyond the set of artists that tend to pop up as reference points in his reviews. For me, Enough comes the closest of his albums to capturing the full breadth of his sensibility, which has made an immeasurable impact on my life and work as a musician and critic, and has room for Randy Newman and Janet Jackson, Keith Jarrett and Gucci Mane, Talk Talk and George Jones, Joni Mitchell and Charles Ives. If you don’t believe me about the last one, check the keyboard riff in the opening section of “Around It,” which sounds like it was imported from an entirely different song, in a different key and tempo, and still somehow sits just right.

Winston achieved the album’s sound by radically overhauling the way he composes music. Where he once wrote in the old fashioned way, piecing together chords, lyrics, and melodies, and then arranging them out for a band to play, he assembled Enough from looped samples, fragments of improvisation, drum machine rhythms, snatches of dialogue sourced from the previous night’s dreams. He exploded Office Culture’s once-stable lineup to a massive rotating cast of players, grounded by Kaplan and El-Solh, and also including Alena Spanger, whose vocal foil on several tracks is a bit like the Martina Topley-Bird to Winston’s Tricky. Guitarist Dan Knishkowy of Adeline Hotel, harpist Rebecca El-Saleh of Kitba, and drummer Jason Burger of Scree also stop by, to name only a few. You can even hear me in the chorus of backing vocalists on centerpiece “Was I Cruel.”

For a few songs, which act as the mile markers that divide Enough’s bleary narrative into loose sections, he handed lead vocals and co-writing duties to other singers: Spanger on the delicately propulsive “Secluded,” Sam Sodomsky of The Bird Calls on the noirish title track, and Jackie West on “Everything,” the beatific duet that closes the record. Enough is Office Culture’s album, but it also feels like a culmination for an entire scene Winston has helped to foster through his work as a serial collaborator in other people’s bands and a series of songwriting salons he began hosting at his Brooklyn apartment in 2023, whose list of regular attendees can be roughly mapped onto the album’s list of contributors. You can hear the countless solitary hours he spent arranging and producing the album’s elaborate edifices, but also the casual back-and-forth of musicians who play together like the old friends they are. Enough is the rare album that feels both like a unified auteurist vision and a joyously social conversation.

The electronic collage aspect of Enough emerged in part from Winston’s desire to explore texture and rhythm with as much thoroughness as he’s always treated melody and harmony. The album has enough style—sparkly surfaces, big bass lines, vocal lines dancing seductively through the hallways of the beat—that a less inspired songwriter might be tempted to cruise on vibes alone. Instead, Winston has filled it with some of the most intricately sculpted melodies and densely insightful lyrics of his career. A song might begin, like “Imabeliever,” by daring you to try to sing or dance along, then duck through some hidden trapdoor into a hook so good you wonder how no one else has written it before. More than anything he’s released yet, Enough feels informed by his deep love of rap and R&B, not just in its rhythms and production choices, but also in his vocal approach: the way a single syllable, with just the right syncopation, can turn a chorus from good to great, or a seemingly offhanded melisma can emerge over repeated listens as the catchiest part of the song.

The words, rarely straightforward but unfailingly precise in their descriptions and metaphors, are often concerned with everyday relations between people in and out of love, potentially mundane subject matter that he renders, through close attention and avoidance of cliche, as riveting drama and surreal comedy. “Was I Cruel” begins like a trial, or a couples therapy session, aimed at nailing down once and for all who was at fault for some dustup. By the end, it’s a disquisition on the nature of forgiveness, its possibilities and its limits, presented in language both poetic and strikingly forthright. “I know you’re a product/of the past /your parents put on you/But that’s everyone,” he muses at one point. “Do I have to excuse everyone/For every shitty thing that they do?” Though the words offer no easy resolution, the music is pointed in the direction of hope. My favorite lines, from “Open Up Your Fist,” are as succinct and wise a summation of moving on from a bad relationship as I’ve ever heard: “Oh, the illusion of trust/Can prove comfort enough/’Til the day that we learn/We didn’t need it that much.”

Of all the CD-era lodestars that I heard Winston mention while he worked on this album, the two that seem the most crucial to me are Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope and Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, both of which have loomed large in his personal canon for as long as I’ve known him. They have instrumental interludes, spoken-word fragments, stylistic detours, weird little tracks you nearly forget until you hear them again and realize they might be your favorites, and some of the hands-down greatest songs of their respective artists’ careers. Enough is that kind of album. The listening experience can be fragmentary and diffuse, even a little disorienting, but there’s always some new thrill or revelation waiting around the next corner. You can listen straight through, or bob in and out, find your own pathways through its labyrinthine tracklist. You might cue up a song and hear something you could swear wasn’t there the last time you played it, as happened to me just as I was finishing this bio. Did he really just say “Hi-ho Silver”? It’s fitting that Enough started with a dream, because that’s what listening to it feels like.

-Andy Cush

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