Written by: Dave Cantrell

So, here’s a question: How can I keep reliving my time in London in 1979 when the music that drew me there siren-like in the first place – all I need to say here is “Magazine,” “Gang of Four,” “The Fall,” and “John Peel” to make plain the parameters of said music which is an almost criminal shorthand given the hundreds of other names unmentioned – just keeps maintaining a presence and strength that commands, nay demands, one pay as much attention to the now as to that legendary past?  I mean, mostly it’s a blessing, right? But at the same time, there is, I’m not happy to report, limits to my capacity to distill all that never-fading past into the mix of the reanimated 21st century scene, which in many respects (aside from it being unavoidably revivalist but when it’s that good who cares?) is at least as dynamic as its forbear. To some extent that right there explains why I’ve recently retired from hosting the darkwave radio show Songs From Under the Floorboard on XRAY fm out of Portland – there are, after all, limits to one’s energies as the big seven-oh approaches and it had been on the air twelve years, so – in that the challenge of continuing to bring anywhere the necessary energy to the task of just bloody keeping up was significant enough that I decided that I’d been blessed enough over the past decade-plus years to pull back the reins a bit and take stock. All of which serves as a rambling but hopefully still astute preamble to the work before us today, especially as the band at hand – Liverpool’s The Room – themselves fit, rather remarkably, on to that same arc of time. Which in itself is fairly remarkable but no guarantee of quality, of course (if anything it’s far too often a source of disappointment), but as it happens, and with great thanks to the dark gods, what we’ve heard from The Room’s surprising (to us) comeback album, a full forty (!) years past their initial disbanding, puts paid to any and all such doubts.

Formed by singer Dave Jackson and bass player Becky Stringer in that same formidable year cited in the first line of this piece – which, granted, lends some personal resonance to my interest in their story and their work – and now joined by original drummer Clive Thomas, guitarist Darren Brown, keyboardist Ethan Kyme and abetted by mesmerizing backing vox from Helena Jacks, what cannot help but amaze is the sheer damn strength of the work and its delivery. As with any work great – like this one – or so-so, the material has to come from somewhere (should you still harbor the belief in the ‘sudden blast of inspiration out of nowhere theory’, well, probably best to rethink that) and in this case the origin story is fairly involved so rather than try to encapsulate it in some quick digestible aside, we feel it’s best, no matter to whatever extent it’s considered a journalistic no-no, to simply cut/paste the block of info from their press release since we consider it too central – and important – to in any way short shrift it. So…

“Consisting of 11 songs, the album shares a continuous narrative through all the following
songs over a blend of post-punk music, like a sort of aural folk-horror feature film. Set in a
mythical 17th-century European forest, ‘The Telling’ follows a traveling storyteller, who
mesmerizes an isolated village with macabre tales of wonder, mystery and the
supernatural – of shapeshifters, wolves and ravens… of a love affair between Baba Yaga’s
adopted daughter and Grendel’s long-lived brother, and some witch-finders who come
under their hammer.

‘The Telling’ was inspired by frontman-songwriter Dave Jackson’s interest in folklore and
myths, and a visit to a cuckoo clock museum in the Black Forest, where he learned about
the traveling clock sellers and storytellers, who used to move between villages. Conveyed
through his spirited yet acerbic vocals, the album was conceived as an aural movie for an
as-yet unfinished screenplay, unfolding as individual self-contained songs like chapters in a
complete narrative, there are no lyrical choruses or repeated themes. The album comes
with a full lyric sheet, influenced by the layout of the Guttenberg Bible.”

And there you have it. For me, as stated, the central strength of not just this track but the album as a whole and by extension, then, the band themselves, is the level of unfettered, straight-ahead confidence on display. Of all the bands whose names float at various strata in the ether of the legendary post-punk years, one would generally not find The Room hovering near the top but this release, at the very least, forces one to reassess one’s perspectives, which in our view is always a healthy thing since little is more limiting, more calcifying than being stuck in some sort of unchallengable ranking matrix. For that at the very least I am grateful for this release. Now, to figure out a way to see them live. Hmmmm…