Some people, when they realize they’ve had a few too many, slam a cup of coffee or grab something hot and greasy to eat. Musicians, if they can afford it, trash hotel rooms. New York singer/songwriter Charlie Kaplan sits down and knocks out a tune. 

In the press notes for his fifth album, Dobro, Kaplan, a former member of indie sophisti-poppers Office Culture, describes how, after partaking of an overly powerful libation, he composed “Chemical Reaction” as a way to clear his head. Tellingly, the song describes someone with much less self-control than Kaplan himself. 

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“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 bemused light baritone. The narrator’s night gets worse from there, but Kaplan treats the saga with comic affection, his lyrics supported by a garrulous taproom melody, jittery palm-muted acoustic guitar, charmingly ragged backup vox, and a simple, immediate beat. 

The sardonic way in which Kaplan hits the second syllable of “water” tells you that, though the narrator may know exactly where he went wrong, such knowledge won’t stop him from making the same mistake twice, or, hell, 20 more times. Yet Kaplan leaves room for redemption. After an ill-starred journey home on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the hapless narrator, adrift in his heaving bedroom, promises that “tomorrow I’ll be a brand-new me.” 

It’s the sort of two-bit bluster common to binge drinkers, but Kaplan ends the song with a held note from the backup singers, who start to sound like a choir when the drone of an organ gets involved. The churchy conclusion has a sarcastic edge, but there might be something genuine lurking in its plaintive tone.

For all the casual offhandedness of Kaplan’s folky arrangements, gritty production, and wry humor (he rhymes “dobro” with “old bro” on the Roger Miller-esque title track, and “hoi polloi” with “Siegfried & Roy” in “Failed”), there’s something serious afoot. The jangly “Failed” expresses real anger with its sunny litany of figures and institutions who’ve let the singer down, from “Jake at State Farm” to “Peyton Manning’s chicken parm,” turning the jokey reference to the deceased Las Vegas magicians into a surprisingly apt metaphor, identifying with the tiger that mauled one of them during a performance: “Between the leather whip and the flaming hoop / You can’t see how you’ll take another day.” 

“Sick of You,” meanwhile, sets lyrics about depression to a bright, shuffling beat, propelled by loping, melodic bass from Justin Cubillos and percolating percussion by Office Culture collaborator Jason Burger. Office Culture leader Winston Cook-Wilson and collaborator Nate Mendelsohn show up on Dobro, as well, and fellow traveler Andrew Daly Frank plays guitar. The song’s coda, like that of “Chemical Reaction,” contradicts what came before it and makes the song title a lie, or at least a half-truth: “But you only learn if you live / that’s why you gotta stay alive,” Kaplan sings triumphantly over gleaming keys. “I want you to stay alive.” 

Kaplan’s previous albums were more overtly autobiographical and contained echoes of his influences—you can hear both Pavement and the Pixies in “Halley” from last year’s A Hat Upon the Bed, while Elliott Smith’s echo murmurs throughout. On the stripped-back, largely acoustic Dobro, he’s mostly singing about characters, but might sound more than ever like himself—drunk or sober.

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