Ground Control Touring

Cloakroom released their last album “Dissolution Wave” into the world on January 28th, 2022, commemorating their 10th anniversary as a band.  The trio spent the months that followed embarking on a number of tours, growing together as a cohesive unit and pushing the boundaries of what could be accomplished in a short amount of time together. At one point, the troupe traveled from Chicago to Salt Lake City and back in a mere six days, playing six shows in the process and traveling no less than 600 miles a day. As the calendar flipped to 2024, Cloakroom launched on their most ambitious schedule to date, playing 27 shows across Europe in just over four weeks time. While this is being written, the band is resting their bones after a 34 date North American run that was completed in 37 days.

By their own standards, their new album ‘Last Leg of the Human Table’ is a couple of years early. After an upstate New York evening spent with Closed Casket Activities owner Justin Louden, the group agreed upon a deal to work together with the label on their next LP. Initially setting out to test the waters with a four-song EP, Cloakroom booked three days at the famed Electrical Audio studio in Chicago in December of 2023 and set out to write a batch of new material. The composing sessions between singer/guitar player Doyle Martin and bass player Bobby Markos proved more fruitful than expected though, and soon the band was faced with the dilemma of picking which songs to include on an abbreviated release and which to save for the future long play.

No doubt inspired by their hectic touring schedules, Cloakroom decided to set out on tracking an entire LP in the three days of booked studio time while on the way to Chicago. After a few long nights of rehearsing and writing with drummer Timothy Remis, the group entered the house that Albini built with longtime collaborator and engineer Zac Montez to begin tracking the ten song effort. Through a rigorous work schedule over the next 72 hours, the band was able to capture the skeleton of the album before driving to Kalamazoo, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana for a couple of end of the year gigs. The band would round out the week by spending some time at Rec Room Studios in Palos Hills, Illinois to lay down some overdubs and further complete the record.

“Last Leg of the Human Table” is not a post-apocalyptic record or a work of science fiction like Cloakroom’s previous LP. If Dissolution Wave was a space western following an asteroid miner protagonist, Last Leg brings the observer back to Earth where most things are not as they’re cracked up to be. For Cloakroom the world of modernity is in polycrisis and America has lost its soul. Narrative fetishism is all too usual of a literary mechanism for Cloakroom. If you listen closely you can hear the concern; not just for the teetering social structure but for what it means to be human and the high cost of the human experience.

T.S Eliot’s ominous “not with a bang but a whimper” has gotten a lot of traction in a post-pandemic world, maybe even too much one could say. That whimper is just tinnitus to Cloakroom; here is the sound of a furnace that can’t stop running. That tonal resonance plays in-between songs on Volume 4 of the band’s discography. Recorded at Chicago’s staple Electrical Audio, there could not be more of a hallowed space to capture this body of work.
Every song is a different sound working together to showcase Cloakroom’s genre-bending capabilities and seemingly vast array of influences; whether it be the sampling of the post-disco Detroit group Was (Not Was) or the lifted NASA recording of the humming of Saturn’s rings. Engineer Zac Montez (Whirr, Turnover) whom the band has referred to as an integral part of the band once again aided in smoothing out the rough parts and turning up the quiet.

The album is truly sonically inspiring. Shoegaze, doom, post-punk, folk just scratch the surface on the band’s shortest yet seemingly most substantial release to date. “Last Leg of the Human Table” can sound sardonic in its nature and it probably is, but this group has always found some wonder in the scurrying chaos of modern life. In 37 minutes, the album almost imbues a sense of responsibility to the listener as if one leg were to falter the whole table will fall.

One the topic of the album’s first single “Bad Larry”, the band had this to say: Is he a bad guy? I think Bad Larry is a reluctant protagonist. Society is already crumbling around him (us) and to operate in this vast grey area one must be bombarded with a lot of tough decision making; it’s always been this way. This is another Cloakroom song written in a folk tradition. I think of the track “Diamond Joe” whose origins are a bit unclear but I think the first recorded version was by the late great Jimmie Rodgers in 1929. It’s a shame that society rewards the unreasonable but at the same time it’s compelling and challenges me to think about how to be just in an unjust world. Diamond Joe or Sanford Clark’s “Buddy” give you a chance to contemplate the allure of the outlaw much like modernity is fascinated with post-apocalyptic living; as if the world isn’t bad enough.

I affectionately called this long-haired black cat “Bad Larry” I’d see ever so often on my property. Couldn’t get near him, he’d rear up and hiss like a cobra. It was his most endearing quality. He definitely was eating snakes and squirrels and song birds out here, drinking out of mud puddles. He’d made it through a couple of winters, but I haven’t seen him in months. I’m sure the life expectancy of an outside cat is cut in half to that of an indoor but Larry sure burned bright. I’d like to think that Larry and Diamond Joe are also capable of kindness, the duality of man, that kind of thing. Sometimes I’d think about taming Larry and getting all the burrs out of his tail and if the vet said Larry was a lady I’d name him “Loretta.”

With “Last Leg of the Human Table” finally releasing into the world, the band seeks some hard earned rest and hopes to raise enough album sale royalties to fix the heat in the beloved tour van “War Sled”.