Cloakroom
Rickshaw Stop
∙
San Francisco
Tuesday, November 7 at 7:30 pm PST
Serves Food
Outdoor Patio
Concert Venue
Bar
Tuesday, November 7 at 7:30 pm PST
Serves Food
Outdoor Patio
Concert Venue
Bar
Details
Description
When Cloakroom first materialized back in 2012, they did so modestly. A couple songs appeared on a Bandcamp page with a succinct description: “Cloakroom consists of three factory
workers from the Region.” As far as biographies go, it’s about as terse as they come. But at the same time, it conveyed everything that they needed to get across, simple facts that speak to greater truths.
These are the facts as we know them now: Cloakroom still consists of three people, vocalist-guitarist Doyle Martin, bassist Robert Markos, and drummer Brian Busch. Though they
were once factory workers, they’ve left the factories behind, but their jobs are still blue-collar.
For Time Well, the band’s Relapse Records debut and second full-length overall, the members of Cloakroom made a work that’s at once grandiose and deeply insular. Following the release of 2015’s Further Out on Run For Cover Records, the band toured alongside the likes of Brand New, Russian Circles, and Nothing. Those tours proved that Cloakroom makes perfect sense opening for instrumental post-metal bands and acts that cut their teeth on the pop-punk circuit, without adhering to either style. Cloakroom occupies a space between worlds, crafting its
unique brand of thoughtfully heavy music, something Relapse has long specialized in.
For Time Well, Martin, Markos, and Busch further explored the creative space they share by opting not to record in someone else’s studio, but to start from scratch and build one themselves.
The culmination of that shared effort is a work that transcends simple genre descriptors. The music coalesces into a thick wall of sound, lumbering forward as one singular piece that never
begins to atrophy. Yet simultaneously, it indulges in the band’s softer side, turning those tributes to Jason Molina into Cloakroom’s very own brand of Americana, one that’s equally concerned with the astral plane and our modern world.
It makes sense then that the band would cite everything from Boards of Canada and John Fahey’s autobiography to the works of Stanley Kubrick and acclaimed Russian science fiction
director Alexei German as influences on the record.