Review: Whisper Room - The Cruelest Month

It starts like the eternal music of a moored up boat. Guitars clang like pulleys swung into wood, while a giddy sequence of tones tug the melody back and forth over a central point; Whisper Room are sleeping, cradle-rocked. Even as the rhythm solidifies into a tunnel of hip hop – with luminous guitar smushed into patterns of drones across the walls – the band sound externally guided, passively drifting into compliance with the graceful, assertive will of nature. Gestures are soft, with guitars strummed with the delicacy of rain splashing on the strings and bass nudging the melody into shape with the subtlety of a coastal breeze. Whisper Room are an open funnel, allowing the music to pass through them without even a flake of intervening ego.

Each track is built on the broken biomass of the last: drums wither into cymbal chime, vaporous guitars change colour, and the rhythm shoots back upward like a stem, reshaped and calling upon a different palette of textural decoration. Dubstep, techno and krautrock emerge in faint hazes…the breed of music that fade up as though approaching me from a distance, crystallising into conviction and clarity as it comes closer, flaunting its spirals and cascades of ornament as it passes by me, delay shooting off the drum hits like powder on the skins. I feel like the fixed point in amongst a music whose shapelessness and fluidity speaks of its transient, eternal existence – The Cruelest Month was here long before me, and it will still be there long after I’m gone.