Album preview: Cloakroom feasts in “Last Leg of the Human Table”

Cloakroom are a band that celebrates their influences throughout every moment of their music. The Indiana-based band have spent their whole career being called genre-bending because of their ability to seamlessly shift styles mid-album and mid-song to achieve a sound that echoes in our heads as both familiar and new.

While admittedly hard to pin a genre to, they seem to be at their core a shoegaze band that can dip their instruments in an entire art store’s worth of paint supply buckets to mix and blend their sound. Last Leg of the Human Table is a testament to Cloakroom’s vision and showcases their techniques and talent for crafting a captivating album. They weave tracklists that are unapologetically authentic and make sure each song on the album is exactly what they feel it should be rather than conform to any specifically understood structure.

On Last Leg of the Human Table they fill in the blank spaces between songs with either some kind of ethereal synth or guitar layer or decaying sustained notes or the clitter clatter of instruments moving through the studio to fill the space before the band begins or just as they end but many of the songs hard cut between each other; ripping us from these glittery shards of the song prior, to the roar of the next, abandoning structure and flow for unpredictability and chaos.

The frenetic nature of their style and structure on the album works extremely well with the songwriting and instrumentation and create tracks that are complex without being inaccessible. As is their style, each song brings something completely new to the table from the last but still reverberates its sound back to you. The best example of this I can point to on the album is the song pairing of “The Lights Are On” and “Bad Larry”. “The Lights Are On” begins with a needle drop and descends into a western long-haul ride through the desert. It stands out from the rest of the album because no other song has this sun-bleached southwestern feeling to it but the song still has that shoegaze heart to it.

The next track, “Bad Larry”, steps even further into the Western world and brings in a twangy guitar and a washboard to finish the country western plunge. Finally, to bring it all back towards shoegaze again, the next song, “The Story of the Egg”, replaces the twangy guitar with a reverbed-out uptempo guitar and the washboard with a fast-paced kick-snare combo and, you’ll have to listen to believe me if you don’t, it blends perfectly back in and the album continues to flow without seam.

The production features a heavily effects-driven sound. Guitars are laden with all kinds of distortion one moment and then clean and bouncing off the walls the next. Vocals follow the same pattern and can have modulation or effect on them one moment and then be crystal clear the next. It creates a vibrant soundscape that is mixed perfectly so none of the instruments or their effects are lost over each other but instead blend and weave beautifully.

There are two tracks on the album that I think will stand out in live shows and those are “The Pilot” and “Cloverlooper”. “The Pilot” is all around one of the strongest songs on the album and is fantastic to listen to on your headphones or a speaker but will be an all-time crowd favourite at shows. “Cloverlooper” is one of the heavier songs on the album and features an incredible mid-song breakdown that will go crazy in the venue.

Check out the new album Last Leg of the Human Table out everywhere on February 28th and see them on tour!