Charlie Kaplan’s fifth album, Dobro, makes its sharpest move by letting comedy carry the weight of harder subjects. Its songs favor stripped-back folk arrangements and ragged edges, but the jokes don’t cancel out the anger or sadness underneath. Kaplan, the New York singer-songwriter and former Office Culture member, sounds most exposed while writing about characters who seem nothing like him. That distance gives him room to make a joke without turning pain into a punchline. The songs can stay funny and uneasy at once, which is a more complicated achievement than simply pairing a sad lyric with a jaunty tune.
A hangover song with a hymn at the end
“Chemical Reaction” began, according to the album’s press notes, after Kaplan had an especially potent drink and wanted to clear his head. The song’s narrator has less restraint: “So yeah that’s when I started drinking / And then I had a couple more / I forgot to have some water / The second I walked in the door,” Kaplan sings in a light, bemused baritone. That understated delivery matters: the narrator doesn’t sound like he’s making a grand confession, and the plainspoken lines let the poor decisions pile up at their own pace. The humor comes from recognition, not from a performance of excess.
The arrangement gives the misadventure a loose taproom swing, with jittery palm-muted guitar, scruffy backing vocals and a direct beat. Kaplan’s stress on “water” carries the joke: the narrator understands the mistake and seems destined to repeat it. After a rough trip home on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he ends up sick in his bedroom, vowing that “tomorrow I’ll be a brand-new me.” It’s a modest scene, but the small details keep it from feeling like a generic drinking song. The vow is familiar enough to be funny; its repeated failure is where the song finds a little sting.
That promise sounds like familiar binge-drinking bravado. Then the backing singers hold a note as organ rises beneath them, turning the ending almost churchlike. The effect is pointedly funny, though its plaintive sound leaves room for a more sincere reading. The shift doesn’t resolve the narrator’s behavior; it changes the scale of the joke, making the promise feel briefly like a plea. A gag with a shadow.
Jokes sharpen the album’s darker turns
Dobro is full of offhand rhymes and dry humor. On the Roger Miller-esque title track, Kaplan pairs “dobro” with “old bro”; in “Failed,” he rhymes “hoi polloi” with “Siegfried & Roy.” These turns can sound deliberately disposable, as if the song is more interested in the pleasure of an unexpected rhyme than in spelling out its meaning. But the latter song’s bright, jangling surface frames a genuine catalogue of disappointments, from “Jake at State Farm” to “Peyton Manning’s chicken parm.” Its reference to the Las Vegas magicians becomes an unexpectedly bleak image as Kaplan identifies with the tiger that mauled one of them: “Between the leather whip and the flaming hoop / You can’t see how you’ll take another day.” The absurdity doesn’t soften the line. It gives the song a way to approach despair without dressing it up as solemn wisdom.
“Sick of You” takes another oblique route, setting lyrics about depression against a buoyant, shuffling groove. Justin Cubillos supplies a melodic, loping bass line, while Office Culture collaborator Jason Burger adds busy percussion. Winston Cook-Wilson, Office Culture’s leader, and collaborator Nate Mendelsohn also appear on the record; Andrew Daly Frank plays guitar. The arrangement’s movement creates tension with the subject, suggesting how a song can sound inviting even when its words describe a difficult state of mind. That gap is part of the point. It keeps the track from settling into a single emotional register.
The song’s closing passage changes its emotional direction. Over bright keys, Kaplan sings, “But you only learn if you live / that’s why you gotta stay alive,” then makes the plea plain: “I want you to stay alive.” Like “Chemical Reaction,” the ending complicates what came before it, giving a dark song a measure of hope. It isn’t a tidy cure or a sudden change in the album’s outlook; the directness works because the song has already made room for discomfort. Here’s the thing: Kaplan’s comic voice earns that plainspoken moment by refusing to make every difficult feeling sound profound.
Character songs that sound personal
Kaplan’s earlier albums leaned more openly on autobiography and musical reference points. “Halley,” from last year’s A Hat Upon the Bed, carries traces of Pavement and the Pixies, while Elliott Smith’s influence echoes through his work. Dobro is more acoustic and more focused on invented figures. That change puts the writing in the foreground: without a full band’s density to hide behind, the lyrics’ odd turns and the songs’ shifts in mood are easier to hear. Yet Kaplan’s dry delivery and the feeling behind these songs make the characters sound uncomfortably close to home.
The invented narrator can be a useful tool for a songwriter: it creates distance, but it also lets an emotion appear in a less guarded form. Kaplan’s characters are funny partly because their flaws are recognizable, and the songs don’t pretend that recognition fixes anything. That balance is the album’s strongest idea. The numbers here are underwhelming only if you expect every song to resolve its subject; Dobro is more interested in letting comic detail and sadness occupy the same space. If you’re working in this space, that’s a useful reminder that tonal shifts can carry meaning without turning into a lecture.
What the album’s tonal shifts leave behind
The record’s acoustic focus and recurring comic turns give it a coherent shape, while its endings resist easy closure. “Chemical Reaction” tips toward a hymn; “Sick of You” turns a dark subject into a direct appeal to stay alive. Those choices suggest that humor, on Dobro, works as a route into seriousness rather than an exit from it. That said, the method depends on the songs’ restraint: if every bleak image arrived with a solemn underline, their oddness would lose much of its force.
What this means for you as a listener is that the album rewards attention to changes in delivery and arrangement as much as to the lyrics themselves. Kaplan’s casual voice can make a line sound tossed off, then leave its implications hanging after the joke has passed. The record doesn’t claim to explain its characters or offer a clean answer to their problems. It leaves the listener with something less polished, and more human: a laugh that doesn’t make the hurt disappear.
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