Cloakroom
Last Leg of the Human Table
CLOSED CASKET ACTIVITIES
ABOVE THE CURRENT
On 2022’s Dissolution Wave, Cloakroom envisioned an alternate reality in which the future of mankind depended on a continuous flow of new artistic output to survive, so long as that creative work benefited its listeners on some intellectual or emotional level. In a sense, this is the very same sci-fi dystopia the band has been working within since forming in the early 2010s, releasing a series of three records that each managed to feel situationally bleaker than the last to reflect the national political mood, yet also more instrumentally upbeat. Each project was even released through a more metal-exclusive label, despite the band’s sound continuously distancing itself from the stoner riffs of their early material—all while the state of the world around them endured more unavoidable collective traumas tamped down atop the last.
If these trends weren’t clear before, Cloakroom’s first album for Closed Casket Activities (home to a wide variety of grindcore and death-metal figures even more deviant than Dissolution Wave’s Relapse Records peers) takes its nigh-apocalyptic name from what sounds like a fictional variation on the Doomsday Clock. Yet Last Leg of the Human Table also manages to be Cloakroom’s most aesthetically bright project to date, going so far as to introduce their new era through the album’s lead single “Unbelonging,” a recording that opens with the type of Paisley electric guitar riff that feels descendent from Obama-era hypnagogic-pop before the band’s signature industrial low-end kicks in. Not to be outdone, second single “Bad Larry” took the form of the Everly-esque pop-country that dominated American airwaves at the onset of the first wave of Cold War paranoia.
It’s a fascinating dialectic that borders on being a bit at this point. More than any of its predecessors, Last Leg draws attention to the impending end times while serving to temporarily alleviate any anxieties that come with that reminder. Opener “The Pilot” kicks off with deafening sludge riffs somehow embedded with a silver lining even before Doyle Martin’s shoegaze-wisp vocals assure us that he’ll be there with us “when the last pillar falls” between the screeching sounds of abrupt chord changes. What follows is the breezy power-pop of “Esther Wind,” the psychedelic raga “The Lights Are On,” and the cosmic space-rock of “Story of the Egg,” all tethered to the dying planet Cloakroom inhabit by the sonic touchstones that have been by our side dating back to 2015’s Further Out. The message may not be sugar-coated, but the sounds of the wailing machinery it’s carried within certainly are.
