A pandemic that keeps people inside and bands off the road is as good a time as any to write a concept album, which is what Cloakroom’s Doyle Martin found himself doing with the trio’s third LP. There are concept albums that are only worth listening to if you’re interested in the story and ones where the story is so incidental that even when trying to focus on that element the result still just feels like a bunch of tracks. Dissolution Wave manages to avoid both of these problems with the strongest set of songs in the trio’s now decade of work. These songs are arranged around a more evoked than described space western narrative in which the titular “act of theoretical physics” destroys the imaginative work humanity needs to prolong its own being, leading scattered remnants to struggle for both physical and creative survival. It’s a Dark Souls kind of story where you’re more picking up bits of lore than having a narrator spell it out in sequence. That means the songs’ stoner shoegaze impact can be appreciated even if you miss the line that tells you our narrator is an asteroid miner. But if you do lean into meditating on its themes, the phantasmagorical desolation that is Dissolution Wave’s intended setting makes the songs hit even harder.
It feels like Martin, bassist Bobby Markos and new (as of 2019) drummer Tim Remis have used the time off since 2017’s dense, sprawling Time Well refining what Cloakroom does and focusing it to a keen edge. That last record stood out as a rare example of the form that both needed and deserved the hour-plus length (rather than just coasting by on vibes), but this one shows that they can be just as powerful at shorter range. Even though none of these eight tracks crosses the six-minute mark (as opposed to six out of ten last time), the closing, multi-part “Dissembler” seems even more vast in scope than its bigger brothers. From its initial Sabbathian charge the song seems to expand and float away, eventually skirting the edge of the ambient. It’s maybe the best single showcase of the band’s mastery of and dexterity with its looming, frazzled sound, but Dissolution Wave keeps throwing curveballs within that style. “A Force at Play” is practically sparkling for a Cloakroom song and “Doubts” has a lambent, late-period Earth-y quality, even as the opening “Lost Meaning” is as hesher heavy as anything they’ve done before and downer jam “Fear of Being Fixed” somehow works in an acoustic guitar briefly emerging from its tarpit atmosphere. This is the trio in all-killer-no-filler mode and the results are pretty breathtaking.
Even as the music gets richer and more varied while staying true to the core of what made Cloakroom already great, the story here takes the band’s recurring theme of grappling with the existential and physical toll of meaningful existence in the world and situates that theme in the middle of a slow-motion apocalypse where all you can do is create what you can and send it into the void, not truly knowing how it will be judged or if you will be successful. It’s not so much cosmic nihilism as it is cosmic absurdism, where meaning can only be self-created. There’s a burden there to be sure, but this isn’t a story about our miner failing; the narrative, such as it is, ends in mid-stride. Doing so brings the heady story back down to earth, literally and figuratively, where none of us knows yet how our story ends or whether what we do means anything. There’s a hopefulness to the way Dissolution Wave depicts that striving without presenting either a disheartening pointlessness or a too-tidy salvation as the end point of it. As much as this album is about writing songs on an asteroid at night, and as much as you can relate that to current events (none of us truly knowing how much our actions are protecting or not those around us), it’s equally about life before and beyond COVID, all of us putting out what we can humming into the ether, trying to connect and sustain.
Here at Birthday Cake For Breakfast, we like to get to the heart of what an artist is all about. We feel that what influences them is just as important as the music they make. With that in mind, ahead of releasing their new album ‘Legs‘, Widnes’ best noise trio Mums talk us through their influences of late. Take it away, Mums…
Words: Andy Hughes (Photo Credit: Utopianmechanics)
Roanne Evans…
Last week Cloakroom returned with their third LP, Dissolution Wave, and it's their finest record to date. Highlight and closer "Dessembler" is a chugging midtempo cruiser with some of Cloakroom's heaviest, yet melodic riffs yet. The cymbal heavy rhythm gives the guitars plenty of room to luxuriate, and the pummeling rolls help sustain the momentum from one movement to the next. The guitars sound as gorgeous as they ever have, but they take on a heightened radiance against the new age synths. After a few minutes Cloakroom ease off the distortion and slip into a lush, jangly guitar passage with a serene vocal melody.
It's an unexpected, but tasteful shift, and it showcases much wider rang e than on any of their prior records. Within the last few minutes the music transitions into a post-rock coda with the celestial sweep of bands like Deafheaven or TWIABP, but unlike those bands they still manage to incorporate some swinging rhythms even as the music soars through the stratosphere. It's the most immediate that Cloakroom have ever sounded, and after a few minutes they abrupty shift into a trudging, spacey instrumental to close the record out. DW doesn't present any major overhauls to Cloakroom's sound, but it's a sharp refinement of everything that they do well.
