Rooms are pretty difficult to get excited about. They’re yet another entry in a disconcertingly long list of post-punk upstarts who (probably after seeing the astonishing amount of fame, acclaim, and cash Interpol has racked in over the years) have angled their guitars, cleaned up their vocals, and smoothed out their production in an attempt to latch onto the long-gone banner of commercially and critically successful FM-radio bound post-punk.
The problem Rooms have is that they checked the originality that bands like Bloc Party oozed with. Rooms’ self-titled record is utterly devoid of anything even potentially exciting. Hell, even mediocre also-rans like Kasabian and Editors brought more to the table than they do. Nothing lyrically, sonically, or thematically hints at a new idea; it’s a retread at its most heinous, destined to fade into the literal legion of better bands waiting at the doorstep. Rooms are absolutely indistinguishable in their mediocrity — the vocals, melodies, and performances are all almost aggressively boring, and the deadened production certainly does them no favors. When you start a career already comfortably languishing in the shadows, you’re not going to convert many people.
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(self-released, no address provided)