Cloakroom is a band I stumbled upon twice, in two separate contexts. The first time was here, on Metal Storm, seeing Dissolution Wave in the "New Releases" page, back when the genre wasn't directly displayed, and guessing, based on the cover art, that this would be more of a grind or industrial or death metal album, before being met by a admittedly heavy shoegaze album. I ended up covering it in our non-metal feature, noting about how weird it is for them to be on our website. The second time I've seen their name as the final band in last year's edition of Roadburn Festival, with a name that was prone to some bad jokes when people asked where an actual cloak room was, and it was only upon hearing their heavy fuzzy riffs live that I remembered that I've encountered them before. So now when I'm meeting them for a third time, I actually remember who they are.
But to circle back to my teaser statement, in my initial write-up of Dissolution Wave I noted "What Cloakroom is doing on Metal Storm, I have no idea. They're signed to Relapse Records so maybe that's why." Well, now they're signed to a completely different metal label, as Last Leg Of The Human Table came out through Closed Casket Activities, an even more heavy punk focused label, which makes it even weirder since this album is continuing to push the post-hardcore leanings of albums like Further Out even further out, a trajectory I've also noticed on Dissolution Wave previously. But still, there's more to Cloakroom's heaviness than slightly punkier sounds past and metal adjacent distribution.
It's obvious from the opening notes of "The Pilot" that this is a shoegaze band that loves distortion. Heavy riffing isn't omnipresent here, and the opening notes might be exceptionally heavy relative to most of the record, but they set a first impression that lasts whenever the band continues to flirt with making their wall of sound feel massive through said distortion. The other mellower elements that blend with that doomgaze do feel like they're on an evolution of their own. The midwest emo that paired with the post-hardcore sound is also diminished in favour of the dream pop that permeated Dissolution Wave, with several nuances like R.E.M.-ish jangle pop or a dash of twangy alt country (see "Bad Larry" for the strongest example). Even some of the heavier bits have some alt rock ("Ester Wind") or noise rock ("Cloverlooper") or space rock ("Story Of The Egg") leanings.
If a similarly heavy shoegaze band like Nothing (who also released stuff on Relapse) can do a proper metal collaboration, then Cloakroom's flirtations at the borders of heavy music also make a lot of sense given how close the two genres have gotten in the past decades. I'm still hoping that we'll get to see Cloakroom properly jumping into something heavier, even for just a slight detour, but for what it is, Last Leg Of The Human Table is quite a fantastically versatile and ethereal album, both due to its and despite its share of heaviness.
