Office Culture’s Charlie Kaplan has returned with a solo single entitled “Cloudburst,” which is set to be featured on his November 1 LP, Eternal Repeater. As a sucker for a brushed snare drum, I was immediately captivated by the warm, morose, and wandering track. A reflection on the pandemic, the single is a gorgeous and unstuffy take on chamber pop, bursting with subtle piano runs, a steady bass line, and guitar that sounds deliciously like a nice pedal steel vamp. Though the song is full of quotables (Kaplan brings the bars), I was particularly moved by this nugget: “Every moment given is a moment gave away.” Chew on that, suckers.
Regarding the track, Kaplan shares: “I love the oxymoron at the center of ‘Cloudburst’: ‘Caught in a cloudburst all day.’ I sat on it for a long time. Then, in those uncanny first few weeks of lockdown in 2020, it suddenly seemed to describe everything around me. How long would this last? What would be washed away once it passed? Ambient fear suffused the placidity of a moment that never seemed to end or resolve. For me, this song is a study in stasis: by the outro, the cycling bass line churns below diurnal major chords and nocturnal minors in parallel keys. I thought of Debussy’s ‘The Sunken Cathedral’: submerged, changeless, uncertain, repeating.
Check out “Cloudburst” below, and pre-order Eternal Repeater here.
