Review Summary: I am the table.
Question for the culture:
Does shoegaze suck?
Before a mob that will never come close to catching me due to an inability to make eye contact or remove their hands from their pockets gives chase, know that I ask this with a genuine curiosity and love in my heart. I’m in my thirties.
Lost in Translation is one of my favorite ̶m̶o̶v̶i̶e̶s̶ films. I gave
Deathconsciousness a perfect rating before /mu/ got their grubby little hands on it -- I
get shoegaze. But I’m convinced that something broke the collective consciousness’ brain on the subject with the Tik Tok-fication of Pinegrove’s “Need 2” that ushered in an era of post-post-post-post-post irony that the scene may never recover from. In the last two years, I’ve attended Duster and Have a Nice life shows that had several immersion-breaking mosh pits puzzlingly sprinkled throughout sets that would have benefited from chilling out. This problem is compounded further by the low-barrier to entry that has caused a surge in low-effort shoegaze “content” -be it sourced from humans or LLM’s- that finds label creeping dangerously toward muzak territory.
Cloakroom, however, don’t suck. That fact alone would make them an extraordinarily easy sell, but they go far beyond that rudimentary bar by incorporating “stoner emo” -their words, not mine- elements to make the proposition a little more unique. “Stoner emo” here can mostly translate to “Weezer (Slowed + Reverb)” which, as it turns out, is a winning formula. 2017’s
Time Well showed plenty of promise through its incredible dense distortion and feedback, but 2022’s
Dissolution Wave stands as the band’s crowning achievement thus far thanks to leaning on poppier structures to introduce some much-needed color and warmth to such thicc aesthetics.
Last Leg of the Human Table mostly continues on this path. More than ever before, the tight structures and relatively forgiving song-length allow for an accessible listen that would have enough points of interest if you were to strip back the distortion and reverb. Lead single “Unbelonging” could almost be mistaken for a jangle-pop tune if it weren’t for its thunderous percussion and the occasional burst of feedback wails- there’s even a final chorus key change! “The Lights Are On” is more of a meditative plodder, but it does so with the aid of three diabolically-catchy riffs to make the “meditative” label earnest rather than a band-aid for “boring.” “Ester Wind” is a shot in the arm in both directions, injecting both the album’s punkiest energy in its first half, and the doomiest in its climactic second. Moment-to-moment, there’s always something to hold your attention. Truthfully, there’s not a lot here that warrants much criticism. The songs are punchy; the atmosphere feels lived in; the production is gorgeous and exquisitely mixed; and there’s much more variety than you would typically expect from this sort of thing.
Still, I can’t help but feel like there is a bit more gold left on this human table, of which we are ostensibly on our last leg. “Turbine Song” is a brilliant closer that drifts hauntingly in space, but it also kind of feels like it comes out of nowhere. The inclusion of two sister instrumentals (“On Joy and Unbelieving” and “On Joy and Undeserving”) and the album’s title itself do a lot to suggest that there might be some grander point that the band are guiding us to, but they are disappointingly put forward as cool elements that never quite cohere. The same can be said about the album’s lyrics, which mostly serve as empty calories when they can be perceived -although the otherwise fantastic “Story of the Egg” has a real clunker buried within (“I don’t have the wherewithal for Godspeed/but they’re still near and dear to me”). But this feels especially in the weeds (and perhaps a bit unfair) to judge
The Last Leg of the Human Table on what it isn’t versus what it is -and what it is, is a good time. While I wish the album had better sequencing or made more of an honest go at being the statement that I think it’s trying to suggest (the state of the world sucks -let’s talk about it!), this pedantry can only exist in lieu of more substantive corrections. More than anything else, the headline here is that Cloakroom continue their winning streak of beating the odds by being a worthwhile shoegaze band in current year 2025.
