In 2005, when Songs the Animals Taught Us came out, Roommate had only existed as a live band for a year. Before that it was the solo recording project of Kent Lambert, who’d fled Brooklyn for Chicago a few weeks after 9/11. Lambert had gotten to know a handful of local musicians by the time he started working on Songs in earnest, but only a few of them appear on the album, overdubbing banjo, bassoon, or whatever they could play. Mostly he made it alone in an apartment, and it sounds that way.
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When I got my advance of the new Roommate full-length, We Were Enchanted (on LA label Plug Research), I expected more lonely beeping and postmillennial tension, softened slightly by the occasional acoustic instrument or hard-won moment of grudging hopefulness. Instead the proportions were reversed: the overall feeling is of human warmth, and the record is swaddled in fuzzy, organic tones thanks to a truckload of live overdubs. Enchanted was recorded over ten months at a series of home studios; drums and hand percussion overlap with the programmed beats on several songs, and the digital tracks are augmented by guitars, basses, harpsichord, violin, horns, bells, and more. Back in 2004, when Roommate started gigging, it was usually just Lambert with his Game Boy and keytar—he might be the only person on earth who can play one unironically—and Evelyn Weston on musical saw. In its current form, expanded to include about a dozen semiregular studio contributors and a five-piece onstage lineup, the band is much improved.
“Enchanted” is basically an eight-minute series of stacked crescendos, beginning with a stuttering electronic drum pattern, a slow, seesawing riff on distorted synth, and Lambert wearily intoning, “It’s been happening a lot lately/Just before I wake up/I see the most terrible things.” With each new verse, more sounds accumulate—mostly digital keyboards, but I think I hear harpsichord and saw—and eventually the tension ramps up to a ridiculous level in a passage built on rapid, cycling arpeggios. Then the whole thing breaks open, like storm clouds parting to reveal the sun, and the song turns suddenly, gorgeously hopeful, with radiant major-key chords overlaid on its taut minor-key patterns. “There is beauty all around/Even when we wandered in a terrible trance,” Lambert sings. The effect is something like having your most depressive friend ask if you wanna go to the park and throw a Frisbee around.
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