Few things cheapen current events like hearing them recounted in rhyme. "Bring us a virus, unite us in irrational fear/ Bring us a mandate and some band-aids and a six-pack of beer." Kent Lambert sings those lines on the title track to Roommate's sophomore album, We Were Enchanted. A few tracks later, on "New Steam", he invokes the muses, "Newsman, sing me the blues, man." In addition to these ostensible references to SARS and Fox News, Lambert also invokes violent video games, haunted McMansions, fluorescent supermarkets, and "constitutional abuses," striving for an of-the-moment gravity that will reflect the dystopia suburban America has become. We Were Enchanted is almost baroque in its topicality, but topicality is easy to achieve. Much harder is knowing what to do with it once you're there.
Lambert hoists the same end-of-days anxiety that fueled Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise and Godspeed You! Black Emperor's 1998 debut F#A#∞. We've heard the world end this way before, but at the very least, this type of statement album gives the group's expanded line-up a lot to do. On Roommate's 2006 debut, Songs the Animals Taught Us, Lambert played most of the instruments himself, but has since recruited a community of roomies to flesh these songs out with a mix of live instrumentation, drum loops, programmed sounds, and weird shit. They give these songs range: With traces of Ennio Morricone, Jack Nitzsche, Philip Glass, and Pink Floyd-via-Secret Machines, We Were Enchanted sounds more like science fiction-- specifically the zero-gravity prog-rock of Heavy Metal-- than literary fiction or apocalypse rock.
That's not such a bad thing, but the music does have to carry what little heft the album has. "Day After" opens We Were Enchanted with a clattering of what the liner notes say are "canjos" (and which the press release says were made by Chicago high school students). It's an unsettling sound, promising to usher listeners into a strange, threatening world. Sure enough, these songs sprawl and bend themselves into odd shapes. The title track dissolves into an unexpected "Tubular Bells" interlude, a brief respite that seems more unsettling than the cacophony around it, at least until Lambert breaks the spell singing, "Funny monkey, come haunt us again." On "Tea Leaves", a stand-out, the band establishes a Beach Boys pop melody, then deconstruct it in a clatter of drums, guitar, and "gameboy programming." Justin Petertil's guitar menaces throughout the album, dogging Lambert's vocals on "Way Out" and soloing on "Last Dreams of Summer", but generally, the musicians band together like a last-days cult, especially on the sing-along "Night", which sounds like the Polyphonic Spree at a funeral. Musically, there are moments of real dread, but the songwriting-- studiously abstract, yet as sensationalized as the blues-singing newsmen-- leavens rather than intensifies that terror. We Were Enchanted makes a whimper, not a bang.
