The Room, "In Evil Hour/Clear!"

LTM
The Room thrived in the late 1980s and embraced a variety of sounds:British new wave, jangle pop, alt-pop, and others. One of the hallmarksof the original In Evil HourLP was that it was originally produced by Tom Verlaine but this onlyprovides a minor understanding of the disparate sounds contained. Theopener, "A Shirt Of Fire," sparks the album with a panoply of layeredand melodic guitar lines and breathy vocals. The chorus of the songconcludes each time with an utterly compelling tempo change,transitioning from a brisk sprint to a deliberate and contemplativewaltz, guitars all the while mimicking the pace. After the downshift,the song then collects itself back into the original tempo with anascending wall of frantically-strummed guitar. "A Shirt Of Fire"instantly recalls bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and The Chameleons.The similarities persist throughout the album, as well. Signaturebreathy vocals, the angularity of the guitars, and imploring lyrics areall distinctly Echoey and Bunnyish at the same time. Perhaps thepremier song on this collection is the tingly "New Dreams For Old." Thesong is prudently represented twice, once as the original album cut andthen as a version featuring horns from a 7-inch release. Both times, itis impossible to deny the brilliance of the song. The first 20 secondsare enough to turn heads: a shimmery guitar intro is swept up by anorgan almost too soon and sure enough everything else thereafter fallsinto place. The rest is pure Brit-pop, reminiscent of Britain's finestlabels who peddled such sounds: Sarah, Creation, 53rd + 3rd, Subway. Onthe contrary, the worst moments come when The Room acquiesce to atemptation which corrupted many of their Brit-pop contemporaries. Theintroduction of lounge music into indie Brit-pop was a truly abhorrentdevelopment which cauterized some unlucky alt-pop bands, largelyBritish, in the late 1980s and early 1990s—and it wasn't just Brit-popwhich suffered under this detestable hybridization. By the mid 1990s,trip-hop, acid jazz, and a host of other musical subgenres popped upwhich had lounge music as their root evil. Even hermetic hip-hop had aperhaps less noxious flirtation with lounge, seen in bands like DigablePlanets. Along those same lines, The Room were not savvy enough toresist the urge of lounge music in some of their compositions. Songslike "Numb" and "Never" are Bossa Novean belchings which sound likesomething Getz and Gilberto might have coughed up in their bettermoments. It could be that The Room were merely partaking in thatuniversal pastime to which all bands are eventually drawn, what mostwill call "growing as a band and maturing musically." Generally, thisis just obfuscation for an unfortunate divergence from a well-honedsound in favor of a less-palateable direction. Such is the case here.Thankfully, the lounginess tends to pop up only in the later material,songs which were taken from the Clear! EP. Intermingled withthese rather disappointing cuts are crisper songs which areunassailably new wave ("The Ride," for instance) and have a much easiertime meshing with the overall sound of The Room. In the end, the powerof the jangle and synthesizers is largely able to dissipate all that issmoky, jazzy, and upholstered with plush red velvet from The Room.

samples:

• A Shirt of Fire
• New Dreams for Old
• The Ride