Cultural Consumption: 3/12/24

Like a lot of you, I work for a company that has, over the past couple of years, made a push toward RTO (corporate slang for "get your asses back in this building that's costing us buckets of money"). I happen to live across the country from said building, so I work remotely the majority of the time, but during the weeks I'm in the office — like this one — I'm very much subject to the social rhythms of the workplace, especially on days when employees are expected to show up in person. Those days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which is to say that our floor was pretty empty yesterday, which made it relatively easy for me to pay at least some attention to the music I was playing in my office. Today? Today was a different story. Between meetings and people just stopping by at random intervals, this has been a "start the record over" kind of day — and not necessarily because I just gotta hear it again.

On the other hand, if I had to pick a record to play over and over again all day long, I could have done a lot worse than Pockets Presents: David Ryan Harris!, a half-live, half-studio recording uniting the titular vocalist with the musical collective known as Scary Pockets. If you're familiar with those cats, you already know what to expect — specifically, a finely seasoned stack of some supremely smooth music. Like Vulfpeck and Fearless Flyers — both of which exist in basically the same sphere as Scary Pockets, and may even trade musicians for all I know — the group works in a vein rich with the type of jazzy chord changes and inhumanly tight playing commonly associated with your finer vintages of yacht-adjacent soul.

And speaking of soul, while I'd never heard of Harris before today, he's a supremely soulful singer, and an extremely natural fit for Scary Pockets. I'd wager that nothing on this album will change your life, but it's a top-to-bottom easy listen, and it walks the line between "timeless" and "homage" more nimbly than most records of its type. The Pockets are so maddeningly prolific that I've gotten to the point where I tend to tune them out simply as a means of self-preservation. I'm glad I made an exception in this case.

It's getting late here, so I'm going to skip the watching/reading portion of the program today — if you're a regular reader, you're already familiar with the stuff I'm doing anyway. We'll see what tomorrow brings.