Doom Pop! Is the latest album by re-animated late 70's early 80's Liverpudlian band The Room who reformed in 2022 and whose current line-up is Dave Jackson, Becky Stringer, Darren Brown, Ethan Kyme and Clive Thomas, with Tom McCabe and Helena Jacks. The album was recorded at Ark Studios in Liverpool and co-produced by Steve Powell and Dave Jackson.
The album opens with Drill, Baby Drill a song questioning the logic of drilling for more oil and if it will hasten our need to live on mars when we finally decimate Earth, all of which is discussed over laid-back indie pop encouraging the addicted oil heads to leave for mars first. With the UK government currently granting licenses for North Sea oil once more this has a very current edge to it.
Magic Games has a wistful, hazy shades of Ghostriders feel for the psychedelic haze this is shot through with, laconic vocals ripe with imagery of dragon flames and ancient books they relied on in childhood.
Things Have Learnt To Walk That Ought To Crawl hints at the fearsome rate of change and the claims being made for AI and other modern technologies, while going full on Bunnymen on the insistent way it nags at the edges of how we get past the dread of what's happening around us.
Trespassing takes us to a billionaire's holiday camp and all the dreadful things they get up too in there little sick fantasy worlds, while the rest of us peons just struggle to survive, the plangent guitars are freighted with sorrow, for where the world is headed towards new feudal times.
Temptation Harbour looks at what happens when a whale washes up on the shore and all the looky Lou's come out to stare at the rotting corpse, while all sorts of other things happen and we wonder just why they needed a floating brief case and what it signals.
Doom Patrol is coming for you now; All the protests won't help when all the resources have been used and something wicked this way comes, in this intoxicating brew and jangly slowly mesmerizing song.
Continent Of Lies is in despair at a continent where lies are celebrated as truth, falsehood turns idiots into heroes, who will hopefully fall very soon indeed, the need for truth to make a return and reality to allow that truth to help provide health care and other essential services, with the organ parts rising like they are playing in an art deco cinema backing a black and white movie.
The Room doesn't feel like a theme song for the band but does have a knowing sense of its existence within the bands sophisticated indie pop world, if you follow the path they set out. No-One Comes Here From The Town is a slow rumbling horror movie narration for the sort of abandoned property that is so foreboding no one even goes to explore round it anymore. It sits decaying, a symbol for what once was but can never return. Stories works around the sturdiest of basslines and cymbal infested percussion to allow this tale to unfold making us think and question what's happened.
The album closes with Drones with a military beat and questions being asked just what has happened to make us live in a world full of killer drones, destroying lives and buildings, they name the architects of death and despair, all of whom should be sitting in cages in Guantanamo Bay, or a similar hostile environment. Are the swarms of drones really progress or just another manifestation of man's endless fascination with creating new ways to kill each other.
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