Naked Roommate

A slippery second album from Naked Roommate falls into the unkempt crevices between post-punk, disco, and no wave. Sucking many of the surrounding genres into the vortex as well, the band continues to be delightfully impossible to pin down. Built on Casio-cultured beats and sliding through a synth fog flecked with sax stabs, the band sketches out a new soundtrack to the bus pass dance class that they called to order on their last outing. The band nods towards cult faves like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, ESG, Medium Medium, and Maximum Joy, and unlike many who’d namecheck the same, they conjure up the itchy edges of pop that those bands explored with sincerity and skill.

They pump the album full of inner tube bass boogie from the first moments and spend the rest of the record scratching those grooves with shards of keyboard and hot-glued guitar lines. That makes it sound more haphazard than honed in, but I can assure you that the band’s minimalist mayhem has been formed and forged with clear purpose. The disjointed funk begins to bend the air, the pre-culture-stamp disco soaks the walls with dancefloor sweat and they cello-tape it all together with seamless skill. Songs roller-skate through the past and present with an irreverent air that’s searching for art over airtime and it’s fun to see someone embrace the aesthetic with such earnestness. It’s hard not to experience a little flashback whiplash from Pass The Loofah, but pastiche isn’t on the plate. It’s a true dip into source, a whiff of the wobble that pulled the punks onto the dancefloor in the first place.

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