Stuck In the Office?

It was late 2005 when I first heard the album "Q&A" by Chicago-based band Office, and their acoustic-electro-pop won me over pretty easily. They impressed me emough so that I gave their last album (and first on an official record label) "A Night at the Ritz" a ringing endorsement, despite it being made up of previously self-released songs that had been re-mixed. Office are a band worth hearing, and if label distribution was going to earn them national press finally, I wasn't about to try and shut them down. The band got enough press to warrant a set at Lollapalooza last year, which was nice to see, and I had high hopes for their next record.

Well, at some point between August of last year and...now, I suppose, pretty much everybody in the band left and Office has returned to its original state: singer-songwriter Scott Masson going it alone, but with the assistance of varying musicians willing to help along the way. Now a brand new Office album has landed in our laps, and it's being offered up for the bargain basement price of FREE. Yes, one of the benefits of being self-managed and produced is that you can choose to do what you like with your music. So the new Office album is titled "Mecca," and as Scott Masson describes it, the original intention was for it to be a double album. The players on the record are pretty much the same collaborators that have been a part of Office these past couple years, though since the recording of the album they have moved on to a new project (that will debut sometime later). Anyways, the point is that this is good music from a good band being given to you for absolutely nothing in return, and I strongly advise that you take it. Click the links below to download, or take a couple sample mp3s and decide for yourselves whether or not you'd like to get the entire thing. I've yet to give it a listen, but if the music is anything like "Q&A" (which by all accounts it is), this should be a solidly great record. After all, that was the album which got the band signed in the first place (before they opted out of their label contract). So download away, the band (or at least Scott Masson) wants you to!

Download every track from "Mecca" by left clicking here!
Alternate download link (left click)

Direct link (right click and save as...) to sample tracks:
Office- Nobody Knows You
Office- Double Penetrate the Market

The official Office band blog
Office on Myspace

Labels: free stuff, office