Cloakroom
Last Leg of the Human Table
Closed Casket Activities
Shoving pieces of cardboard underneath the Last Leg of the Human Table won’t keep it from collapsing. Prepared to go down with the ship if all hope for mankind is lost, Cloakroom is keenly aware of the precarious state of world affairs. Dissolution Wave, their dystopian 2022 cosmic western manifesto, was saddled with similar anxieties. However, they’ve rearranged some of the furniture here to accommodate their propensity for genre-hopping.
Vaguely reminiscent of Girls Against Boys, washed clean of the sleaze and unsettling menace that drugged their indie disco decadence, Last Leg of the Human Table is mostly a cruising post-punk nightcrawler, sleek and dark, detailed with the shoegazer crunch and chem trail blurs of Swervedriver and Catherine Wheel and the dramatic flow of Editors. “On Joy and Unbelieving” is a meditative, lo-fi interlude of related elements, a sheet of whirr slicing through the airy, softly plucked calm settling over an otherwise turbulent stretch of sounds. Prone to fits of distorted screeching and wrenching, Cloakroom pushes the pace with “Cloverlooper” and “Ester Wind,” both slick, pulse-pounding drives motoring into the gloaming, while mysterious opener “The Pilot” loudly and noisily slowly drags its body to its final resting place.
Thankfully, there appears to be no end in sight for Cloakroom, their richly contoured, stylish draping interrupted by spasms of tortured guitars and covered in sonic layers of blackened bristle and sharp crackle. Big-picture themes of uncertainty and alienation hang over Last Leg of the Human Table, a rush of gorgeous, bittersweet, jangly dream-pop like “Unbelonging” feeling exposed and vulnerable. If it ran alongside the streaming, melodic storm chaser “The Story of the Egg,” which switches gears so powerfully and with such beautiful subtlety, they’d hold hands and jump headlong into a staticky, swirling squall and disappear, perhaps to go floating weightlessly through the drifting, spacey closer “Turbine Song.”
“Little things are easy to lose” is a line, pregnant with meaning, from “Bad Larry,” a lush, slightly smeared folk-pop character sketch with a heart full of wanderlust. Its haunting, spaghetti western atmosphere seemingly carried over from Dissolution Wave, the track speaks to an ability to tell smaller, more grounded stories of uncompromising restlessness and fearless individualism. Cloakroom, it seems, is open to anything. ◼
