#cloakroom

After 2022’s excellent, focused (story and sonics both) Dissolution Wave brought the group a bigger audience, it wouldn’t have been shocking at all for them to double down on its concept album ideas. Instead, Last Leg of the Human Table was originally supposed to be an EP until with typical industriousness they just… decided to record everything they’d written. It keeps some of the tighter structure of the last LP (hovering around 37 minutes again), but here hits with a casual, tossed-off brilliance in contrast to last time’s very intentional affect. Still, both are addressing the same issues; in their own phrasing, “what it means to be human and the high cost of the human experience.” Whether they’re working over the phrase “little things are easy to lose” on “Bad Larry,” spending the charging “Cloverlooper” doggedly expressing defiance, or embracing uncertainty with the hazy, sometimes folky psych of “The Lights Are On,” the atmosphere is always somehow both fraught and reassuring on Cloakroom songs. Things are getting figured out, but not quite yet. Or things are doomed, but not quite yet. We’re always in that very human interval where both effort and fatigue are in play.

And yet, they always stay in good humor (it would have been so easy to make this about the last leg of the human race, but things refuse to get that dire). Even when the closing “Turbine Song” ebbs into the gloom where “there’ll be no light left to find me,” it feels perversely reassuring. Back on their second album, 2017’s Time Well, Cloakroom established themselves in a distinct register so strongly they could have easily become one of those self-pigeonholing bands that just goes deeper inward to plumb that one particular depth (in some cases to great effect). Instead, they became the kind of act that figures out how to go in all sorts of directions without ever losing cohesion. Every song here is inescapably from the same band that made those earlier records, and almost no songs here would fit smoothly into that older work. That’s a rare and precious talent, and on Last Leg of the Human Table Cloakroom make pulling it off sound easy.