This album contains the first new music as The Room in 38 years. Now that’s what I call a hiatus!
The Liverpool post-punk band formed way back in 1979 by singer Dave Jackson and bassist Becky Stringer but broke up six years later when widespread praise from musical peers together with support from John Peel failed to be translated into sales.
Jackson and Stringer went their separate ways and formed a number of other bands but have joined forces again prompted in part by the global trauma of the pandemic. They are joined by guitarist Darren Brown, Stringer's son Ethan Kyme on keyboards and drummer Tom McCabe.
Two songs -The Drift and Time Comes - are directly inspired by the limbo condition induced by lockdown and the album is pitched as An exploration of man’s search for meaning and the dysfunction of the human condition.”
Happily, the songs are more spritely and accessible than you’d imagine from this rather daunting description. The engagement with the modern world and coming to terms with social media is all part of the quest. Sleepless centres on the “mass hallucination” that results from mobile phone addiction, Mirror World is about getting lost in cyberspace where “lies are truth” and Crying Face is dedicated to a Facebook troll.
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Dust Motes has echoes of fellow Scousers ‘Its Immaterial’ and is a catalogue of impressions of a desolate urban setting which includes “warehouses stacked with mystery goods and libraries of unreadable books.”
Kingdom is a terse atheists hymn to counter a believer’s hope (“When I die, I die”) and reflections on the transience of life are central to the The Reeds in which Jackson’s voice is a little reminiscent of Edwyn Collins.
All told, these songs of experience mark a welcome return of a band that have been gone too long.
The Room on Bandcamp
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