Cloakroom – Last Leg of The Human Table | Album Review

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Closed Casket Activities

It’s been three years and some change since the last Cloakroom album, Dissolution Wave, made its deep impact on the scene with the fascinating narrative of an asteroid miner’s life set to the backdrop of expansive fuzzed-out riffs, accompanied by desolate, crushing, and occasionally fissionful drumming. The dusty space epic’s successor, Last Leg of The Human Table, brings us back down to Earth with warm, grounding sonics and the tight, cloying squeeze of noise, all topped with lyrics that left me wondering: Is our number truly up?

‘Rollicking’ feels like a cheeky adjective for an album about just how bad everything feels. Yet when we work our way from “The Pilot” to “Ester Wind,” it's the word that lights a cigarette and asks if you’d like one. There’s a surprising amount of cordiality on Last Leg, an utter affability that is pretty comforting and can even make you forget how genuinely upsetting some of the lyricism can be. 

I’m listening to the album and scrolling, a fittingly wasteful activity, I know, but as I'm gorging on stimuli, the album's mystique unwraps a level. “The Lights Are On” thrums and undulates as I thumbwalk through videos of mass deportation news, an article about cops in North Carolina getting caught on film escorting neo-nazis to rallies, and another screenshot text wall gofundme post to bail out a friend of a friend or to help out a family in Gaza. The careful coat of feedback mirrors the numbness I feel as the entire world seems to be screaming out at me from my screen. 

Does it make you weak?
Does it take its toll?
The lights are on, but no one's home
Does it wear you thin?
Does it grind you down?
The lights are on, I don't know how

These words echo in my ears as the phone’s dull glow is swallowed by my darkening eyes. The track wafts in and out of soft, melodic chords before rearing up and stomping back down into thick and heavy guitar work that even J. Mascis would crease a grin at. 

Many a fellow reviewer has noted that there’s not much in the way of thorough questioning and answering on this record. They’re correct. Last Leg of the Human Table asks broad questions and rocks on its heels when you ask for an answer. However, this sort of gruff muddlement feels as natural a design as the tasteful harmonies and hooks found on the LP’s run. 

Last Leg of the Human Table has all the swing and sway of a rocking chair on a front porch with an all-too-clear view of the end of the world as we know it. The hum and buzz, softly padding careful fretwork, and rubber band wrist drumming all feel not too dissimilar from how a black hole breaks you down into whatever yet-to-be-named sub-sub measurement of the infinitesimally small we'll come up with, unknotting you like the slow, steady hands of an ever ancient elder being unspooling the yarn of some failed project. 

All the same, the delicate work is done with care and compassion, and this is what bleeds most through the album's attempted questioning of our state of affairs. No single answer can feel satisfying for all of this, but asking the questions is an ongoing need. It's how we battle complacency, it's how we challenge internal comforts and surrender, and though Cloakroom aren’t writing some grand war hymn for our present times, they are, however, doing what many of us should be doing: wondering out loud.

Southern California born and raised, Elias can often be found at the local gig, be it screamo, emo, hardcore or whatever. Their time in the scene is patchwork but their dedication to it and the music that makes it has made up the last few years of their life. They love this shit with the whole of their heart and will talk your ear off about it if you let them. Screamo for fucking ever.

Love your friends. Die laughing.

Avery Friedman – New Thing | Album Review

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Audio Antihero

Growing up, my brother would record jam bands in our basement, which meant that I often found myself accompanying him to Guitar Center, where he’d spend what felt like hours looking at cables. To keep myself entertained during these trips, I’d walk around the main showroom and watch guys shred. To me, shredding was the coolest thing you could do with a guitar; it was so fast and so loud, I thought that surely there was no better way to exhibit one’s mastery of the instrument. Then, one day, while jumping around YouTube, I discovered Jeff Buckley and realized that I was wrong. The way Buckley played the guitar was way cooler than shredding. The sound when he played just wrapped itself around you, it was incredible. It didn’t matter that his guitar playing wasn’t particularly loud or fast; I knew then that what I was listening to was the pinnacle of what someone could do on the guitar, and it totally changed how I thought about the instrument. 

As I listened to “Into,” the first track on Avery Friedman’s debut album, New Thing, I was reminded a lot of Buckley’s playing. I’m not saying that this is a one-for-one comparison—I doubt that we’ll ever see another Jeff Buckley—but in approach and technique, the way things are given space to ring out, the feeling behind the notes, I was hearing so much that reminded me of him. The track serves as a fitting introduction to the excellent guitar playing featured throughout the record, both in other Buckley-esque moments like the intro to “Flowers Fell” and on songs like “Biking Standing” where a more contemporary indie approach is taken. It’s all just so good. 

For a more specific example of what got me fired up about the guitars, let’s take a look at the song “Finger Painting.” The track starts with Friedman singing over nice-sounding electric guitar arpeggios, with a subtle acoustic joining about forty seconds in, adding open chords that complement each arpeggio change. This all sounds great, I’m listening, loving how smooth and in the pocket the playing is, and then we get to the second verse. At this point, Friedman adds a third guitar, a lead that’s awash in what I think is reverb and flanger, mirroring the main vocals and building to a climax that blew me away. The way this third guitar oscillates between perfectly following the lead vocal’s rhythm and falling just a bit out of step is perfect, and it adds so much to the song without doing all that much on paper. It’s one of those things where if you just looked at a tab of it, I’m sure it wouldn’t seem that hard to play, but to do it with that feeling and that rhythm, it’s awe-inspiring. In the last minute of the song, all these layers that have been building on top of each other fully come together and then blast forward into a conclusion that’s absolutely sublime.   

After listening through the first few tracks of New Thing, I thought that I had a pretty good handle on what to expect vocals-wise for the rest of the album: a cool, understated delivery with light modulation that sets a vibe without being too forceful. Then, I get to “Photo Booth,” and I’m just about knocked over by this much less obscured presentation of Friedman’s voice that punches its way to the front of the mix, effortlessly sliding into a high register as she sings “Give you a little look / Truth or dare pupils.” It’s not so different that you’d think it’s a new person singing, but the change both in delivery and production really pulled me in and helped me realize just how good her voice is. “Biking Standing” is another song where we see this more raw version of Friedman’s vocals, giving the track a particularly intimate feel. Unobscured like this, the quality of her voice is undeniable, and it creates a strong foundation for the addition of harmonies and vocal layering in the song’s back half, elevating it and making it one of my favorites on the record.  

With so many vocal modes at play, it highlights that when we’re hearing something, it’s an intentional choice rather than something done out of necessity; what we have here is an artist painting with a full palette. For example, the unbridled and unobscured delivery I loved so much at the beginning of “Photo Booth” would not make any sense on the trepidation-focused “New Thing,” where the more laid-back approach perfectly fits lines like “It’s a little bit of a new thing / It’s a little hard to predict / And I can’t quite describe it / It’s like a magnet flipped.” “Photo Booth” is a song about going for it romantically, and the vocal goes for it. 

All of these little things get to the heart of what I love so much about New Thing; it’s a record where we get to see an artist fully executing their vision. Zoom in on any song, separate all of the parts, and it’s clear what purpose each serves. This clarity of purpose is bolstered by great musicianship, and every choice made is the right one. It’s rare that a debut presents us with an artist operating at this level and making something so fully realized. When we get a record like this one, it’s worth cherishing, and I’m ecstatic that New Thing is now out there for everyone to experience. 

Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. He has a blog about cassette tapes called Tape Study that you can find here, and he also makes music under the name Cutaway Car.

Bedridden – Moths Strapped To Each Other’s Backs | Album Review

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Julia’s War Recordings

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the high-voltage film franchise Crank, starring my favorite action star from across the pond, Jason Statham. You all know these films, right? If not, the story revolves around Statham playing a hitman named Chev Chelios whose final job goes awry, only to wake up the next day poisoned by some sleazy-looking henchman. The kicker is Chelios only has an hour to live unless he keeps an ample supply of adrenaline flowing through his body as he searches for the antidote. Each antic to keep his blood pumping gets crazier than the next. Does he pick fights with the police? Of course. Doing hard drugs? Ok, we’re getting there. How about taking jumper cables to the testicles? Yep, that’ll do it.

So I was thinking, what if Statham didn’t have to do these death-defying stunts to stay alive? What if there was just something like an album that assisted our hero’s adrenaline in a safer, more controlled way? There was a thought: how about some fire-invoking music that Chelios could continuously play in his earbuds to keep his heart rate up? Enter Moths Strapped To Each Other’s Backs, the debut LP from the Brooklyn-based shoegaze band Bedridden. After an impressive showing with their 2023 EP, the group hones in on sludgy guitars turned up to max power and dizzyingly catchy choruses, proving an instant recipe for a great album.

Frontman and guitarist Jack Riley leads the charge with heavy-handed, fuzzed-out guitars and songs that fly around like a blur. Riley has a strong support system in the form of Wesley Wolffe (guitars), Sebastian Duzian (bass), and Nick Pedroza (drums), who collectively steer Bedridden’s signature thumping sound toward something gargantuan. The band comes at you in tidal waves of hard-hitting power riffs that are one part lo-fi, one part grungy, and will instantly blow you away. It’s easy to imagine that Riley and Co. might have had a poster or two of Kurt Cobain on their bedroom walls growing up. The band’s frenetic energy is reminiscent of that same vitality I hear whenever I listen to Nirvana’s debut, Bleach.

Riley writes brutally observational lyrics about the nuances of life and the uncanny interactions that can come from the most unexpected places. Some of the exchanges from afar read like Larry David-esque plot points like in the thunderously-seething “Chainsaw,” which is about Riley getting hot under the collar at their new roommate’s fixation with wanting to buy a lamp. I hope it was at least a lava lamp. The trashed-up opener “Gummy” finds Riley both drunk and high on an MDMA gummy, rejecting the continuous advances of a co-worker. Both songs are examples of the absurd situations life sometimes puts us in. Riley turns these experiences on their head by confronting them directly in these songs.

There’s also a jagged rawness that lives within the lead single, “Etch,” a gloomy-grungy rager that opens up like a mid-90s Hum song and finds Riley unspooling lyrics about pulverizing someone snooping into his life. “Philadelphia, Get Me Through” depicts a night of drunken debauchery in the City of Brotherly Love while dealing with the pain of a dead-end relationship. The song climaxes with monstrous, gorilla-pounding guitars that surely will blow your speakers out. Riley isn’t afraid to let out his anger in these songs, taking the pain from his everyday life and thrusting it on the bevy of guitars at his disposal.

“Heaven’s Leg” is a hot tub time machine of a song taking us back to the glory days of early 90s alternative rock. Here, we have mountainous walls of layered guitars paired with angsty, in-your-face lyrics about an interaction gone wrong with a pastor who lost his leg. The song is a hit in every sense of the word and should be a mainstay on KROQ radio if there were any justice in the world. I’m reminded of Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins when I drop the needle on “Heaven’s Leg,” and that’s one of the highest compliments I can ever give. 

Bedridden are an incredibly energetic shoegaze band that brings the heat of their fuzzy power chords with the hopes of blowing everything and everyone off the map. The band’s knife-edged sound has a future to be an exciting new voice within the subgenre that should entice everyone to keep up with their next moves. Moths Strapped To Each Other’s Backs is a buzzy debut that isn’t front-loaded nor back-loaded but fully loaded with nonstop shoegaze bangers that keep the party going from sunset to sunrise.

David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He's also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram @davidmwill89, Twitter @Cobretti24, or Medium @davidmwms.

Ribbon Skirt – Bite Down | Album Review

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Mint Records Inc.

In 1980, Vince Clark and Andy Fletcher formed a band called Composition of Sound. Their music wasn’t really gaining traction, and they became a bit embarrassed about their name. It was stuffy, slightly dull, and didn’t fully connote their sound. They attended a synthpop concert, a burgeoning genre in the UK in the years after cheap synthesizers hit the market, and were inspired to make a sharp change in style. With that shift, they decided it would be a good time to ditch the name, and they landed on borrowing the title of a French fashion magazine – Depeche Mode. We’ll never know if Composition of Sound’s change in style would have taken off without the name change, but shortly after becoming Depeche Mode, their ascent to stardom began to take shape. 

Though their previous moniker, Love Language, was nowhere near “Composition of Sound” levels of generic-sounding pretension, Montreal rock band Ribbon Skirt, led by vocalist/guitarist Tashiina Buswa and guitarist Billy Riley, are following a similar path with a new name and a darker, more dynamic sound. “We needed a little bit of a refresh,” the band describes one of their last shows as Love Language in the Summer of 2024. “Billy came up with [Ribbon Skirt], which is kinda funny.” Tashiina’s Anishinaabe heritage inspired the new name - one that conjures her native identity and the tapestry of influences that inform the band’s new direction on their debut album, Bite Down. Ribbon skirts, worn by women of several native American tribes, could be seen as a means of continuity between the ceremonial and the everyday. Similarly, the band uses this new project to bridge their native identity with a contemporary rock aesthetic.

Photo by Ani Harroch

The band is working overtime as they usher in the Ribbon Skirt era. I had a special opportunity to speak with Tashiina and Billy at the tail end of this year’s SXSW, where they played nine shows in four days. “It’s crazy how insane it can make you feel,” Tashiina says as she describes the feeling of playing a show for a crowd of two people on the same weekend that they played in front of hundreds. After spending a couple of months with Bite Down and admiring the work that the band is putting in, I feel confident that they’ve played their last show in front of a single-digit crowd. With a fresh name, some new collaborators, and several years of experience under their belts, Ribbon Skirt have put together a collection of tracks that will be very difficult to ignore. 

The album’s opening track, “Deadhorse,” sets a moody tone with a 45-second introduction of drums and effect-laden guitar, unfolding and laying the song's foundation before the vocals come in. Lyrically, “Deadhorse” establishes a few of the album’s core themes: occupying space, feeling invisible, and getting stuck in unwanted cycles. Mentions of “standing beneath the cross” and “rolling away the stone” evoke biblical imagery that highlights Tashiina’s presence as an Anishinaabe woman in our current context, both in her compulsion to call upon a higher power and call out the deficiencies of modern Western culture. “Cellophane,” Bite Down’s lead single, follows with a similarly moody, post-punk ambiance and an extra sticky hook. Her clever combo of desperate plea and biting critique continues with an evocative cry of “save me, white Jesus,” comically calling out the same imperialistic veneer intended to obscure native identity.

When I spoke with the band about their organic songwriting partnership and process, they outlined an intuitive workflow. Most of the time, they get into their jam space until Billy lands on a guitar part he likes, and then Tashiina writes a vocal melody. “We hit the nail on the head over and over again until something happens… the songs are pretty barebones, and then we build them out in the studio. It’s a pretty long process,” they say with a smile that acknowledges the challenges but also communicates pride in what they’ve created. Ribbon Skirt’s process doesn’t sound easy, but the results are diverse, polished, and highly dynamic.

After a strong start, the following two tracks, “Off Rez” and “Wrong Planet,” make up my favorite one-two punch on the entire record. “[“Off Rez”] had so many different lives,” says Tashi. “It still didn’t really end up where we wanted it to… I think at some point, you just have to let go of it.” Hearing that about one of my favorite songs on the record was hard to fathom. “Off Rez” represents a more defiant shift in tone and features some of my favorite lines on the record as Tashiina playfully mocks who other people think she should be. The line “they want 2000s Buffy Marie” references the famed singer-songwriter who was recently stripped of several cultural recognitions after a 2023 report revealed that she had fabricated the Indigenous ancestry on which much of her musical identity relied. 

When I asked them directly about reconciling native heritage with Western musical culture, Tashiina said, “We’re a rock band…I think it’s important to take up space in places that you wouldn’t normally find indigenous people.” Ribbon Skirt don’t seem interested in engaging with tokenization; they’re letting the music speak for itself. “Wrong Planet” is in contention for my track of the year, as Tashiina’s performance here takes the best parts of 2010s post-punk sprechgesang and Courtney Love’s low register screaming. The vocalization about two-thirds into the song that leads into an explosion of pure catharsis is the most memorable moment on the record - one that I cannot wait to experience live when they (hopefully) come to Atlanta on the tour they alluded to this Fall.

Side B of the record is just as strong as the first, with a handful of daring sonic experiments that find the band exploring the farther reaches of their sound. “Cut” is a second-half gem with a fresh instrumental palette - acoustic guitar, subtle strings, and a buoyant piano section. “Look What You Did” comes close to spunky indie pop à la Wet Leg or English Teacher. “41” has a healthy dose of autotune, and “Earth Eater” wraps things up with a seismic closer that the band wisely chose as the final single leading up to Bite Down’s release. It’s all wrapped up in a tight 36-minute package that keeps things fresh and exciting the entire time without giving anyone genre whiplash - it all makes sense within the new identity that the band is cultivating.

Over the course of these nine tracks, Ribbon Skirt set out a few different possible paths forward in the post-Love-Language era  – all of which excite me for the future of the band. In an indie landscape that feels oversaturated with nervy post-punk and playlist-friendly shoegaze, Ribbon Skirt have made something that feels relevant without being overdone. Whether it was the renewed energy brought by the name change or simply the culmination of years of hard work and experience, Tashiina and Billy have crafted their best project yet, and I fully expect to see Bite Down covered as one of the most exciting debut albums of 2025.

Parker White is a tech salesperson moonlighting as a music writer. When not attending local shows in Atlanta or digging for new tunes, he’s hosting movie nights, hiking/running, or hanging out with his beloved cat, Reba McEntire. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @parkerdoubleyoo, and you can read other stuff he’s written over on his Substack.

Glare – Sunset Funeral | Album Review

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Deathwish Inc.

Music nerds love to talk about tone. As a failed musician myself, I’m obsessed with a great tone despite never being able to achieve one in any of the bands I’ve been a part of over the last fifteen years. I could write a novel’s worth about records with great tones, like the futuristic post-punk frenzy of Wipers’ 1981 seminal sophomore LP Youth Of America, the thick smoked-out sound of Acid King’s 1999 stoner rock masterpiece Busse Woods, or the crystal-clear shimmering production of Porcupine Tree’s 2005 contemporary prog cornerstone Deadwing. It’s one thing to have an album full of great songs, but when the songs actually sound great and everything is dialed in just the way it should be, the listening experience is that much better. That is the case with Sunset Funeral, the tonally impressive debut album from Texas alternative rock group Glare.

The old adage of bands having their entire lives to make their first album is Glare’s call to arms: for eight years, they’ve been slowly churning out singles and EPs, starting with 2017’s Into You and 2018’s Void In Blue, both successful initial projects that have garnered millions of streams since their release last decade. In 2021, Glare returned with Heavenly, their most substantial offering thus far but still not completely reflective of the band they’ve become. Their eleven-song output that precedes this new album is but a blueprint, a test run, a work in progress, the calm before the Sunset. These new eleven songs that make up the band’s debut LP are explosive from top to bottom and result in some of the biggest-sounding independent rock music I’ve heard in the last year and a half. This is a windows-down with the car radio cranked type of album, a get-a-call-from-your-landlord-to-stop-making-so-much-noise-during-“quiet-hours” type of album, a blissed-out blast of ‘90s alternative reignited for the modern era.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: the band name Glare, the album name Sunset Funeral, the dreamy pastel photo album cover that goes with it, and the track names therein like “Chlorinehouse” and “Different Hue” all make it very obvious what this band is all about: thickly layered guitars, vocals so washed in reverb you could shower in them, and a general reliance on big, atmospheric rock that lets them sit comfortably with contemporaries like Downward and Prize Horse. The band and album scream modern shoegaze (or, blech, “nugaze”), but they scream it with such confidence: a big pedal energy attitude of ‘This is who we are, this is what we do, and we’re going to do it as well, if not better than anyone in the monsoon of bands filled with former emos who discovered the classic run of Dinosaur Jr. albums.’ Additionally, Glare further sets themselves apart from everyone else with their tone expertly dialed in on each element. It’s one thing to get the guitars just right in a shoegaze band: that’s the part most people focus on, but Glare has clearly spent the time to make sure every member’s instrument is showcased in a noticeable way. Perhaps the strongest of them is the drums, which have one of the clearest and most thunderous sounds on a modern record of this style that I’ve ever heard.

If you heard any of the Sunset Funeral advance cuts — the sweet and groovy “Guts,” the full-force rocker “Nü Burn,” or the overarchingly thematic tone-setting album opener “Mourning Haze” — you already got a taste of Glare’s perfection of their genre. It’s not always common for a band to deliver an entire project that lives up to, and in some cases exceeds, the power of its singles, but that’s only part of what makes this album feel so special. As soon as I turned on “Mourning Haze” for the first time, I couldn’t believe how great it sounded for a first song, with its room-filling volume and a power that I’ve rarely heard matched this decade. There are only about twenty seconds of relenting when “Kiss The Sun” comes in next, until it bursts into another bright headbanger, riding the line of melody and heaviness reminiscent of influential bands like Torche and Hum.

Sunset Funeral is an album that feels so good to be lost in; its pacing is such a perfect rhythm that it’s easy not to notice that you’re halfway through the tracklist by the time “Nü Burn” begins. Glare seamlessly weave their way through every moment of this record, even down to the instrumental interlude “Felt,” which builds up to “Nü Burn” just as breezily as it winds down from “Chlorinehouse.” The soft closer “Different Hue” glides along so smoothly that it sounds completely natural leading back into “Mourning Haze” if you start the record over again. I love finding great three-track runs on albums, like “Begin The Begin” -> “These Days” -> “Fall On Me” on R.E.M.’s 1986 alternative classic Lifes Rich Pageant, or the semi-suite of “Closer You Are” -> “Auditorium” -> “Motor Away” on Guided By Voices’ 1995 landmark lo-fi odyssey Alien Lanes. You could throw a dart anywhere on Sunset Funeral and get a great three-track run, which I suppose makes the entire album a great eleven-track run, a rare feat in 2020s emo-adjacent music.

In a style that can often be monotonous or too heavy-handed in its ‘90s worship, Glare stands atop the slew of guitar rock bands with finesse, grace, and panache (pardon my French). Whether it’s on more relaxed tracks like “Saudade” and the almost-eponymous “Sungrave,” or on any of the bombastic singles, the band breathes new life into shoegaze with every second of Sunset Funeral’s runtime. It’s one of the tightest debut albums I’ve heard from a new band this decade, and possibly even on a longer timeline than that. I have no doubt that by 2030, Sunset Funeral will be talked about the way we talk about Nothing’s Guilty Of Everything, Title Fight’s Hyperview, and Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, and for my money, I’d put it above those last two for sure. Get sucked in by the sunset, Glare is here.

Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.