Interview with Cloakroom

This is Northwest Indiana not Chicago

Of all the bands that have been part of the shoegaze revival, or whatever sort of off-shoots that get lumped in with the term, I’ve consistently found Cloakroom to be one of the most interesting. At their core they tend to opt for slow, drawn out, and expansive music. The bass tends to be so syrupy-dense it consumes much of the sound, and yet there is more often than not a shimmering lullaby of a voice atop it all. While this description doesn’t exactly deviate terribly from what people think of as slowcore, or shoegaze, or slow-gaze, or whatever else you wan to label it it’s Cloakroom’s consistent experimentation of not giving people what they expect that separates them from the rest. Instead they like to offer surprisingly effective songs that are still ‘them’ but take big turns from whatever they were doing last. Whether it be outer-space country songs, psych ballads, or pop nuggets they are frequently throwing the listener off the trail. It’s not to say those heavy parts are gone. The band is just interested in what else they can explore. Their newest album, “Last Leg Of the Human Table” might just explore those wild hairs more than any other record of theirs to date.

I opted to talk with bassist Bobby Markos, as well as drummer Tim Remis because I wanted the perspective of Cloakroom’s evolution of both those members- Bobby having been in the group since their inception, and Tim having been an outside observer for the first two albums, and then joining officially in the last three years. Here’s what transpired.

Tim, you have the outsider perspective of having known the other guys in the band forever, and seeing them before you joined, and then joining in as the drummer. What’s your take on how things have evolved with the band before you joined?

T: I remember vividly, and fondly, watching them through the window of Doyle’s (guitar/vocals) house, and I think it was their first show. Doyle had this show space that was maybe one point a garage. It was insulated and furnished and we would have shows there. I knew Bobby and Doyle, and I knew Brian, the former drummer. He’s closer to my age and we grew up in the same scene, knowing the same people, and I didn’t actually know that he was a drummer. So I was watching them play, and was like, ‘this is my favorite thing.’ I felt like I immediately, intimately connected to it. You know when you have those rare moments when you hear music that feels like it was designed by a scientist specifically for you, and then super connected to the people who were involved in it, and then being surprised that I didn’t realize Brian was the baddest-ass drummer of our group of drummers. I was like, ‘why didn’t you tell me you could play drums?!’ I had known for for over ten years at that point!

Fast forward to when they needed me to step in and I felt like I was obligated to do the service of being in the band to help it in any way I could, or that they needed because I felt so connected to it. It needed to be done, and it needed to be heard, and needed to be seen. I wanted to be a part of that in any way I could.

Bobby, what’s your take on the band’s evolution since Tim joined? And also, this might just be my limited scope, but it appears that Cloakroom has toured a lot more since Tim joined.

B: From our perspective- Doyle and I- we admired Tim through Sweet Cobra and The Killer, and all the bands he’s been in over the years. We always looked up to Tim as a guy who was always just a little further down the road than us in our careers. He had accomplished a lot, and written a lot of great music for a long time.

So when our ex-drummer Brian was starting to have complications to where he couldn’t be on the road in the way that Doyle and I were used to Tim saying, ‘I would do this, I’d play for you guys’ was big for us. His drumming in The Killer made us think this was going to be pretty wild, but Tim has a such a crazy vernacular for a drummer. His ability to play different styles of music and come into a band and transform things is great. He made Cloakroom something completely different. I remember doing that first tour with him and people that had known our band for a long time, and had seen us a bunch, we’re like, ‘it’s different with Tim’. And I thought, ‘oh, is this bad?’ And they would say, ‘no, it’s good.’ That was awesome to hear. He made us a lot more of a rock band.

That being said, I joke with everybody that Tim’s probably been touring since Doyle and I were in diapers. He knows this lifestyle, and it’s always been a part of his life. So he came into the band and immediately played the role that we needed to be out there more. Brian couldn’t really facilitate that with his responsibilities at home. That’s no shade to him. We’re just in different places. Doyle and I came into Cloakroom both having been in touring bands for ten years leading up to it. We were both ready to hit the road because this is all we know. But Cloakroom was kind of Brian’s first real band. It was a bit foreign to him. We could tell on those first few tours when he had to unplug himself from his home life it was very complicated for him. So when Tim joined we thought it was cool because we’re thinking, ‘it’s Tim from Sweet Cobra’.

So many things changed when Tim joined the band. But you nailed it, we’ve been able to be as active as we wanted to be since he joined.

Honestly, I don’t think I saw you with Brian until 2017. The first time I saw you Jason (Gagovski, Suicide Note, Sweet Cobra) was filling in for you. And every time since it’s been Tim.

B: It was getting to where when we wanted to do tours with him it had to be situations like he had five days total and we had to do the West Coast in five days. And we’d have to start by driving the van there and him meeting us there. It was touring in a way that wasn’t logical at all to do it.

T: I feel like Brian wanted to skip the grind and go fast-forward to being the darling band that does this fly-in big shows. Like the sort of band that does three big shows a year in different cities and is everyone’s old favorite. But he sort of wanted to circumvent the middle part where you put out five records and then tour on each one.

He’s always had an interesting approach to all of his endeavors. He’s so talented. Like, my impression of him is that I didn’t know he was a drummer and suddenly he’s the best drummer. And now he’s kind of lost interest and moved on to the next thing. In my whole time knowing him it’s always like that. Now he’s teaching Spanish. I didn’t know he could speak Spanish! He just moves on to the next thing and is insanely good at it, whatever it is, every time.

My impression of the band from the beginning up to now has less to do with membership, but more in how you present yourselves. On those first couple records there seemed to be a very intentional air of mystery to the band, like ‘what is this? Who are they?’ with the promotional materials and stuff. But now it seems you’re all so forward-facing. The videos you all make are very clever, and story-driven and you’re all always in them.

B: You nailed it. It was an intentional thing. It was on me and Doyle’s behalf because I was in another active band at the time called Native. Doyle was in a band called Grown-Ups that was just wrapping up. From our experience in the music industry any time you’re in a band and you were trying to do something new everyone would just grasp at whatever band you were in and call it a side-project or something. And Cloakroom wasn’t a side project, it was the band I was now in. Doyle didn’t want it to be ‘ex-Grown Ups’. We wanted Cloakroom to stand on it’s own two feet from the get-go. We didn’t want to go through that weird growth period of being a side project, or ex-members of, or any of this weird bullshit that media conveniently takes. It’s lazy journalism in my view. Sure, it might be helpful but Cloakroom sounds nothing like Native or Grown-Ups, or anything we had done before.

So on the first EP I played under a false name. We went through such great lengths to hide our identity at the very beginning, and that carried over a bit until probably when we put out “Time Well” and signed to Relapse. Things changed a bit then.

We’ve always been so proud of our band and wanted people to like our band off of merit and nothing else. It’s always been ‘listen to the band first and then discover them as people’. And then later they find out it’s two dudes that look like mechanics and one guy with a nice haircut. What a weird band.

T: I can’t add much, but I think also that geographically where the band is from led to the ambiguity of it. You tell people where we’re from and they’re like, ‘what’s Michigan City, Indiana?’, or whatever. So it’s a bit fun to play into that and not be like, ‘we’re a Chicago band.’ It is a special thing. When I learned more about the scene that Bobby and Doyle came from, and where Jason (Gagovski, Sweet Cobra/Suicide Note) came from and I would think, ‘how did these fucking freaks come out of this part of Indiana? Why are there so many crazy good musicians from there? Whats the cocktail?’ I think that’s an interesting part of Cloakroom that is a part of the answer to your question.

It took me a bit to put together as well, with the mystery and all that. But once I found out it made more sense as to why you all would know the guys in Suicide Note, despite sounding completely different.

B: Part of the reason we were so determined to say we were from the region that we’re from because there’s a long-running tradition, like since Doyle and I were in grade school, of the next region bands. So it would be that this band and this band played together, and then two dudes from those bands formed this band. So there’s this mystique around the next region band, like, ‘oh wow, those guys are playing together now!’ It’s just two counties in Northwest Indiana but we all grew up and the same 100 people like and play good music. So we all just gravitated towards each other and over time you met people from Lake County, or Hammond and they’re into the same thing. So in the long tradition of region bands, being very insular, is cool. I mean, I know people in Boston, and I could I could be in a band with people from Boston, but Doyle’s in the next town over and he rips. I’ve played shows with him forever. So this is the next region band.

T: It’s funny because being from where I’m from I shouldn’t want to be an honorary member of a region. I was actually more jealous of wanting to be from that scene than the one I grew up in. Ya know, I had the Chicago scene, and as a kid I thought was cool. But I kind of wish I had what these guys had, or at least maybe working one day a week in Indiana or something just so I could claim it. Force my way in.

There’s certainly something to be said about small town, small scene. It kind of forces you to be original. It’s kind of an old school thought, but region-specific sounds used to be a real thing. You could hear a band from, say, Louisville and know right away they were from Louisville. In small towns you don’t have access to everything so you have to make your own fun and make up your own thing. Growing up in Syracuse we definitely had a region-specific sound we were known for, but going even further north to small places like Oswego where’s there’s not much those kids had this insane scene going on. They didn’t have a lot so when something did happen everyone would just flip out. When I would go check out shows up there it was awesome because kids were just so stoked on everything and it would be just like Bobby described with the same group of people playing together, switching around, and starting new bands. And really awesome people and bands came out of that scene.

T: My cousin was from Watertown, NY and he’s the one who got me into hardcore, so he was ostensibly part of the Syracuse hardcore scene.

That’s some small world stuff. But getting back to a bit of the beginnings of the band, you all were in bands that were not only way different from one another, but also way different than what Cloakroom sounds like. How did you all land on wanting to do a band like Cloakroom?

B: Doyle and I were probably two, or three bands deep at that point of playing shows together. Our high school bands played together when we were like 15. So we gravitated towards each other because we were taking it seriously. It wasn’t just fun. We wanted to play music for a living. It’s still fun, but we’re very serious about playing music. To me, Doyle was always the most talented person in the region. He could actually sing. He’s the only person I know that could sing a tune and write great vocal parts too. I’d seen him do that a lot.

I was still in Native, which was very post-hardcore, screamo-adjacent type stuff. He had just finished with Grown-Ups, so he was kind of venturing into more poppy, melody-driven things. He was in a screamo band before that called Lion Of the North, and they were very fast-paced.

I grew up loving 90’s music and for my age, in my school, I was just a few years late to getting into bands like Nirvana, and Soundagarden. I missed it by a couple years. I was in maybe 4th grade when I heard that stuff. I found out about it from older kids I knew. I knew it was kind of taboo, but it was cool. And so even though I was in Native and we were playing very angular post-hardcore I still defaulted to that sound. I loved 90’s alternative rock, and thought it was cool. As I grew up I discovered more and more pieces of that scene that missed. I got into Earth, and Codeine, and other bands that weren’t on the top 40 chart. I thought that stuff was even cooler. So I had that in my brain. And then I went to the house Doyle was having shows at and he had a Nirvana cassette playing in the living room between bands. So that’s when he and I first started talking about 90’s stuff together. Honestly, when he and Brian started jamming I think it sounded a little different before I came into the fold. They had a song written and it was a lot more mid-tempo. Doyle thought it sounded like Tom Petty. When I was invited to join in I had some riffs that didn’t work for Native and he had some stuff. But what really tipped the scale was that right as we started to jam I went to see a Codeine reunion show in Chicago. Doyle and I went together and it was incredible. The heavy and quiet, and the slow, and all those elements were just on display. So when we first started working on those Cloakroom riffs we were like, ‘this is cool, but let’s play it Codeine slow, like really slow’. So that took these songs that were mid-tempo and bit more poppy and tuned them into early Cloakroom, the slow core. So it was anchored in those 90’s pop sensibilities, the chord progressions and sense of melody, but it was rooted in less popular parts of the 90’s like Earth and Codeine. Brian love bands like Failure and Swervedriver so he would play those records for us and then that influence started to seep in as well. And, obviously, we loved Hum.

So the band was influenced by stuff we always loved, but just never had the chance to play ourselves.

I think another intriguing thing I came across was when Cloakroom was still in it’s mysterious sort of era and I had no idea who you all were I was at some random show and I remember it was some band from Chicago and as their roadie was getting stuff set up on stage I noticed he was wearing a Cloakroom shirt, but it was a Charles Bronson (Chicago hardcore band) rip off design and I thought that was about the coolest thing I ever saw. But it made me wonder, ‘are the guys in Cloakroom hardcore kids?’ I mean, the band obviously doesn’t sound like punk or hardcore, but I put it together that you had to have come out of that scene. And going a step further, it feels like a lot of your audience comes from that scene as well because it seems you still play to it. So do you play to that crowd because it’s what you’re used to, or do you have trouble winning that audience over? I know that most recent tour with Full Of Hell and Spy and Better Lovers was probably a strange fit.

B: I think we discovered that the older we get that you can be in a punk band and not be a punk band. We all grew up playing basement shows, we all grew up driving around in dilapidated vans, crashing on people’s floors. That punk ethos is very much alive in us and we always default to that, that’s what we know. We weren’t an industry plant and magically on a bus and playing the House Of Blues. It wasn’t like that at all. We still tour as a punk band and I think if you’ve ever seen Cloakroom on a headline tour we probably played a dive bar and we were probably at the bar and you probably met us. So we’ve always carried ourselves that way and people from that scene they dig us and understand us. That’s always been our listener base- people from that world. They found us there and we still live there.

But we’ve done a couple tours that were out of our realm- we toured with that band Brand New, and then the tour you were just talking about, was out of our realm in that we were playing bigger venues, to a more ‘mainstream’ audience. And I use ‘mainstream’ loosely because a lot of people who go to see Better Lovers or Brand New, they’re going to a concert. They’re not going to a show. It’s like a night out on the town, they may only go to a few concerts every year or something. And they will see our band and think we’re probably the most bizarre thing they’ve ever seen. They don’t know what to do with it. Half of them may be intrigued by it and the other half are totally turned off. But the ones that like it will come out every time after that.

The places we ended up playing with Brand New, when we go back to those places those same people will come out to those shows. People will say, ‘I saw you with Brand New 10 years ago’ and still come out.

Do you mean Brand New the pop-emo kind of band?

B: The disgraced pop emo band. Yeah, them.

Wow. Well, every time I’ve seen you, aside from the most recent time, you were always touring alone. I’d imagine being on a tour package has got to be a bit strange.

T: The thing I miss about when we were on that most recent tour, which was a package tour, is that we were playing maybe 30 minutes a night. And I feel we’re at our best with a longer set. I get the logistics of a tour like that. We were the first band out of four. So it’s going to be short. But it’s also weird because I come from a punk mindset where 30 minutes is more than enough, and with Cloakroom we do better playing for longer. This is not traditionally what I’d go for. But with Cloakroom I want to be playing for like an hour and engaging with people for that hour. It was kind of a weird jarring thing every night.

So I have to ask, because I had no idea about this, but Bobby you work on a TV show and do some color commentary as well. And it got me thinking about the quality of some of the videos you’ve made for the band. Does your TV work allow you to make those videos easier? Is there a hook up of some kind? Is there a connection.

B: Honestly, the only thing from my work in production is that it helps me have a better understanding of how something is made. So, the concepts for the videos all totally come from me, Doyle, and Tim. We dream up some wild hare-brained scheme and then my producer brain thinks, ‘ok, this is how we can actually make this’. That’s all it really comes down to. We befriended this team of three guys who are just incredibly gifted. They are incredibly gifted visual artists. It’s this guy Matthew Julius and his team and they’re all photographers and cinematographers. They play multiple roles. They were fans of Cloakroom going into this, which is awesome. I had met Matthew, who goes under the moniker Colorshift via Instagram. I saw his work on there and thought his stuff was incredible. And then I noticed he’s from the same region. He’s a region rat, from Hammond, this is crazy. So I reached out to him and we just started trading secrets, and when it came time to make the videos for “Dissolution Wave” I said we should work together and they were down. We did the first video together and that video went so well. They were just cut from the same cloth as us that we just ended up doing all our videos with them from then on. But they operate very much the same way we operate. We have this huge 90-day production idea that we need to execute in one afternoon, how do we do it? And they’re like, ‘yeah, we got it’.

And that’s very much the Cloakroom way now, especially since Tim joined the band. It’s like, how do you take a year’s worth of band experience and micro-dose it into one day, and we do that over and over again. If you look at everything that Cloakroom does, from tours to recording, to music videos, every experience is like that. We do these things in such a short amount of time.

So long answer for a short question, the only thing that my production experience has helped with is that I can help a bit more with the direction side of things. I can kind of have my foot in both puddles, so to speak. So I’m sort of bridging the gap between being in the band being on our production team a bit.

As I kind of wrap up I realize I haven’t asked anything about the new record. But there’s something related to it that I find a bit humorous in a way. When I saw you this last time you played a few new songs that were in that style most people know you for as being slower, heavier, riffy, whatever. But the singles you’ve released so far from the album are the farthest thing away from what you typically sound like. It’s a bit daring and kind of a gamble.

T: I feel like the song “Bad Larry” that we recently released is probably the farthest thing from anything else we’ve done. But on the last album we also did the song “Doubts” as a single, and it was basically a country song. But as a band we do those sorts of things. We write and record those songs and we play them on tour. But just the other day I was watching the “Bad Larry” video with my sister, my girlfriend, and my son and kind of laughed because it was so different. Like, if you didn’t know who we were you wouldn’t think we had this other side. Like it would be really jarring if that was your first experience with our band and then hear the rest of our stuff. It’s a risky take. But it’s a right we have as musicians to go where our ideas are going and that this is the journey we’re setting up for, you want to come along? If not, oh well. We’re not bound to any structure that’s expected of us to adhere to.

B: Same. My mom loves “Bad Larry” and “Doubts”. I’m so glad that after all these years of writing loud, heavy music I can write songs that my mom is into (laughs). But I think honestly this work started with “Dissolution Wave”. As Tim was joining the band I know I was becoming infatuated with artists that I love shifting into something else. Take, for example, The Beatles. They were a bubblegum pop band for five years and then they wrote “Revolver” and everyone was like, ‘what the hell just happened?’ It was still The Beatles but it was a new direction. They shifted sonically and people were losing their minds about that. But that shift allowed the White Album to happen and everything after it and I think that’s their most compelling work. And so many bands have done that. They became genre-less.

Cloakroom was always talked about as being a stoner band, or a shoegaze band. Sure. But if you can truly be genre-less that’s awesome. A band like Yo La Tengo. No two songs are the same. No two records are the same. They’ve made a career out of being truly boundary-less. So bands that I really admire and look up to they operate that way.

So I was in that mindset when we started writing the songs for “Dissolution Wave” and then Tim became our drummer, he helped us finish the record and what he brought to the table songwriting-wise it fully liberated us. We can do anything we want, any song we want, any sound we want.

So that started on “Dissolution Wave” and now with “Last Leg Of the Human Table” it’s fully untethered. If you listen to the record every song could be a different band, but it’s all Cloakroom. I’m really proud of that.

If we have any kind of legacy as a band, when this is all said and done, is that was Cloakroom. It wasn’t they were the best whatever genre of music. That was Cloakroom. And Cloakroom was just something you had to experience. If you didn’t here are the records, but I can’t define it.

I’m finally starting to see in the write ups about “Last Leg Of the Human Table” that publications are starting to define as genre-bending and that is the most gratifying thing I could ever have. I don’t want anything, I just want us to be us.