#dissolution wave

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.