Perhaps more than any of their peers in the contemporary heavy shoegaze ecosystem, Cloakroom seek a balance between atmosphere and song. Where the “doomgaze” label that they often earn suggests an overwhelming heaviness, their most recent albums—2017’s metallic and dreamy Time Well and 2022’s spaced-out Dissolution Wave—indicate more headiness to their songs than to those of others in their orbit. It’s what’s kept them singular among other ‘gazers dipping into the metal toolbox. If metal primarily celebrates a selection of rock techniques that create an oppressive atmosphere, Cloakroom are quick to test the atmosphere of varying sonic planets across an album. On their fourth full-length, Last Leg of the Human Table, that can take the form of dream-pop one moment then alt-rock the next, before darting into country territory. Every track glows with a burdensome halo, blunted by Doyle Martin’s spectral singing. It’s a dizzying mix of structure and abstraction.
Some songs on Last Leg of the Human Table pick a lane and stick with it, while others begin as one thing before giving way to something else entirely. “Ester Wind” fits the latter bill best. Thick riffs, and a propulsive beat that feels sunny and vast, collapse into a puddle of psychedelic noise, as if the song suddenly melted into a pool of lava. “Ester Wind” is Kyuss meets radio rock, mapping the interstices between the unlikely bedfellows of youth alt-punk and stoner metal. “Bad Larry” straddles two lanes at all times, melding folk and dream-pop in a kind of David Berman-meets-Wild Nothing exercise. “Well, the lines, they get blurry / When there’s no real need to hurry / I can’t tell you last time I’ve eaten / Or how a bitter heart keeps beatin’,” Martin coos with a gentle outlaw’s resignation. Dissolution Wave offered western flashes; “Bad Larry” is what happens when you make country music the centerpiece of a song that is otherwise fundamentally Cloakroom. Even “The Lights Are On” has some tinge of folk-rock, incorporating the big-sky feeling it can create into shoegaze. It’s heavy space rock that feels rooted.
More importantly, every riff—melodic or pulverized—is caked with mass and egged on by Timothy Remis’ unobtrusive drumming. His fills on “The Pilot” are selective flourishes, moments where a more ostentatious band might demand more intense wallops as proof of capability. For Cloakroom, however, that restraint begets balance. Even when the guitars are more explosive, everything feels level. The weightiness still comes through when the band experiments with jangle pop on “Unbelonging,” with abstracted guitar distortions flying in the background like comets. “Unbelonging” is an uncanny mix between the Umbrellas and Holy Fawn, where undulating guitar conflagrations are accented with tambourine hits that split the difference between fiery and sentimental. It’s confusing, but undoubtedly a toe-tapper. And, aesthetically, it fits in with Cloakroom’s critical take on the human experience, marked by unending crises that throw the point of human existence and living a “good life” into peril. And if that good life falls out of your grasp, it’s not necessarily the end: “No one here’s at fault / The car is gonna stall if it’s gonna stall / Anywhere we are / I can find a way to a nowhere bar.”
Cloakroom dial up the tempo and the mess on “Story of the Egg” with a sludged-out take on post-punk. Inspired by the sense of heightened embodiment that comes after getting a proper rest for once in your life after working with a sleep doctor, “Story of an Egg” feels like having every stimulus skate through your peripheral vision and graze your ears, generating a newfound, yet terrifying awareness of the world. Suddenly, everything is perceptible—every tonal shift on the guitar, every drum and cymbal hit, every nearby vocal utterance. The song closes on a Was (Not Was) sample before fading into the second of two meditative instrumental interludes, “On Joy and Undeserving.” “On Joy and Undeserving” and “On Joy and Unbelieving” are fuzzy and vaguely sentimental snapshots of motifs that offer chances to breathe. Like Dissolution Wave, Last Leg of the Human Table is brief but action-packed, as moments of proper reflection become welcome breaks in tension.
Last Leg of the Human Table is a multifaceted approach to what Cloakroom have always done best: spaced-out, riff-laden rock steeped in the traditions of stoner metal and shoegaze. On albums like Further Out, or the truly sprawling Time Well, the Northwest Indiana trio took their sweet time, balancing the entropy of their reverberating guitars with Doyle Martin’s gentle, haunting singing. Throughout Last Leg, the band keeps it tight, compressing overwhelming feelings into brief vignettes that fit familiar song structures from popular traditions ranging from post-hardcore all the way to jangle-pop. That constrained vastness weighs each song down with a healthy dose of dread. Cloakroom are catchy one moment and morose the next, but they never let their heavy aura slip. Last Leg of the Human Table is balanced but broad, unearthing the everyday senses of dread that come from today’s human experience in all its shapes and colors. Oddly enough, it comes off as reassuring: Cloakroom knows it doesn’t make sense. You’re not crazy for thinking that.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.
