The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
There’s a darkness on the edge of town in middle America, and you can sense it in some of the best albums of 2017 by up-and-coming indie bands. A feeling of doom is embedded in the moody heartland rock of Indiana’s Thunder Dreamer‘s gorgeous debut Capture, and it roars throughout the sludgy Siamese Dream throwbacks of Michigan trio Greet Death‘s powerful first record, Dixieland. And the darkness definitely echoes in the music of Cloakroom, a heavy-riffing “doomgaze” band whose excellent second LP Time Well comes out Friday.
Formed in 2012, Cloakroom is based an hour east of Chicago, in an area of Indiana that’s distinguished by intense industrialization and rural isolation. I have driven through this part of the country numerous times, so I can testify to how desolate and lonely northwest Indiana can be. Listening to Time Well feels like one of those long drives, in which vast metallic structures billowing exhaust into the atmosphere suddenly appear on the horizon amid countless acres of corn fields. The album opens with “Gone But Not Entirely,” in which a mechanical drum beat pounds nearly unaccompanied for nearly 30 seconds, like thunder rolling up over a hill. Finally, a meandering guitar riff enters, increasing the sense of foreboding. Relief comes only when the song finally explodes into a wall of fuzz during the softly murmuring chorus.
The rest of Time Well unfolds in similar fashion. Tension is ratcheted up by punishing, deliberate tempos supplied by the rhythm section of bassist Robert Markos and drummer Brian Busch — think Black Sabbath meets midwest slowcore kingpins Low — and is then released by singer-guitarist Doyle Martin, whose playing veers between airy shoegazer-inspired beauty and metal-tinged fury.
When I reached Martin by phone last week, his chatty affability contrasted sharply with the melancholy conjured by Time Well‘s suggestive murk. While Cloakroom has been compared with dark-hued indie outfits like Songs: Ohia and Codeine, Martin was most eager to talk about “heavy” songs by Townes Van Zandt and Randy Newman. (“When I say, ‘A song is heavy,’ I mean, ‘Damn that song carried a lot of weight,'” he enthused.) Born in La Porte, Indiana and currently living a town over in Michigan City, the 28-year-old Martin appears to be in no hurry to leave his home, even as Cloakroom has steadily gained a following.
“There’s a lot of really great weird musicians here,” Martin said. “[There’s] a great hardcore guitarist that’s playing in his room every day when he gets off work from molding plastic, and he’s insane. And then there’s a bunch of really interesting country musicians around here. Also, some Grateful Dead cover bands.”
When Cloakroom posted its first batch of songs on Bandcamp, it included a terse yet evocative biography: “Cloakroom consists of three factory workers from the Region.” (Martin used to work at a screen printing plant ruin by a former punk musician, but he’s presently employed as a bartender.) The biography suited the band’s stark music and hinted at a romantic blue-collar origin story that subsequently became a narrative for critics writing about Cloakroom’s 2015 debut album, Further Out.
At the time, Cloakroom was sometimes classified as a metal-leaning emo band, likely due to the fact that Further Out was distributed by Run For Cover, a Boston label best known for working with Modern Baseball and Pinegrove. Time Well, meanwhile, will be released by the successful indie metal label Relapse, which means Cloakroom will probably now be classified as an emo-leaning metal band.
“We haven’t really tried to classify ourselves,” said Martin, who sees a “healthy mixture” of metalheads and emo kids at Cloakroom’s shows. “There’s a lot of dudes and ladies in black hoodies with tallboys, that nod their heads. That’s the classic spectator, really. Then sometimes we play with other bands like Citizen or Basement, the people that are on Run For Cover, and some wild kid will stage dive for us, and I’ll break my character like, ‘Hell yeah.'”
No matter the label affiliations of each album, Further Out is somewhat louder and more metallic than the dreamy Time Well, which the band refined over the course of a year at its home studio. Whereas the band had to drive a couple of hours to Illinois to make Further Out with producer Matt Talbot of the venerated ’90s alt-rock band Hum, the ability to record Time Wellon their own kept Cloakroom in “the pond,” which is how Martin refers to the small but close-knit community of musicians in northwest Indiana.
Martin echoes a common sentiment among small-town musicians I’ve spoken with — living thousands of miles away from media centers like New York and Los Angeles tends to tamp down any preoccupations with careerism, which means people have to make music for music’s sake.
“It’s like these bands, they’re getting together, and writing these songs [and] not thinking about the venue down the street, they’re thinking about trying to record a record,” Martin said. “Trying to maybe send it to somebody in Chicago and then set-up a show, a year from now or something.”
Cloakroom wasn’t even supposed to be a professional band, Doyle maintains, but rather a way to blow off steam after work with friends. Martin and Busch both worked at the screen-printing plant, while Markos had relative notoriety as frontman of the post-hardcore band Native. But the lark soon spawned an EP, 2013’s Infinity, that got the attention of Run For Cover.
“I always wanted to be in a band with Bobby, and I was like, ‘Hey, I got this great drummer, you should come out and play bass for a couple of these songs,'” Martin recalled. “We didn’t plan to do anything with the band really other than write a couple of songs.”
Now that Cloakroom recorded has two great albums, Martin still has no plans to leave his bartending job. Being in Cloakroom is “an amazing excuse to travel,” but he shrugs off any suggestion that it might be a way to make a living some day. Perhaps that’s just a reflection of the flinty place from which Martin hails. You can take Cloakroom out of Indiana, and but you can’t take Indiana out of Cloakroom.
Time Well is out 8/18 via Relapse Records. Get it here.
