Chamber: this is goodbye...

Chamber have packed their third full-length, ‘this is goodbye...’, with more ideas than should be possible within its relatively short 30-minute runtime, yet every detail of the record feels fully fleshed out and nothing overstays its welcome. This is truly the work of a band that is confident in its sound and has figured out how to keep innovating and improving upon its previous work.

Much has been said about the rise of streaming services and their effect on the process of discovering new music. As a child of the '90s, I spent a great deal of time rifling through the used bin and impulse buying CDs at my local record store, choosing albums based on their covers or if the band name sounded cool or even just purely based on vibes.

Now that I’m an adult with a much broader taste in music (and many more bills), I’ve learned to embrace The Algorithm and make it work for me in much the same way as good old-fashioned crate digging. My DSP of choice is Tidal, which I will take any opportunity to plug as the least of all available evils of this era, and its algorithm has served me some of my favourite music of the past decade that I’ve been on the platform. So, as I’ve told Tidal that I enjoy artists like Every Time I Die, Mr. Bungle, Car Bomb and END., it suggested Chamber’s 2023 album ‘A Love To Kill For’, which became my second-favourite release of that year in any genre (my favourite was Dreamwell’s incredible ‘In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You’, for those curious).

When Chamber announced their third album, I was already beyond excited. But when they said in an Instagram Q&A story that the biggest influences on its sound were The Mars Volta, Converge, Glassjaw and ‘Extraction’by Greg Howe, Victor Wooten and Dennis Chambers (which happens to be my favourite jazz album of all time), my expectations skyrocketed. From the moment the album begins, the Nashville outfit, who describe their sound as “psychotic mosh metal”, come out swinging. Time signatures and tempos swirl in a whirlwind of squealing guitars, blast beats, vocals that sound like a feral beast being released from its cage and plenty of crushing breakdowns that put the “mosh” in “mosh metal”.

There are a few moments of relative calm throughout the first ten tracks of the record, with clean guitars and even some clean vocals. But even in those sections, there is a pervasive sense of tension that leaves the listener waiting for the next chaotic outburst. Each successive track builds on ideas that have been presented before while also introducing new ones that keep the listener on their toes. This is particularly prominent in the middle section of the album, where the three-song run of ‘Surveillance’, ‘Parting Gift’, and ‘Angel’ offers some of the most dizzying change-ups the band has written to date, showcasing the members’ eclectic taste in music outside the realm of hardcore and metal.

‘Angel’ is the standout track for me personally. With its gabber-influenced intro, myriad production effects, the way the clean vocals harmonize with the guitars in the pre-chorus and the polyrhythmic drums in the first breakdown section, the track showcases Chamber at their most inventive. You can sense how much fun the band had while making the record.

Towards the end of the record, we are treated to a 48-second ambient track (‘Death Without Departure’) and a glitched-out electronic piano outro to ‘In Revolving Doors’, both of which allow a moment to reflect on everything we’ve just experienced. Chamber has packed ‘this is goodbye...’ with more ideas than should be possible within its relatively short 30-minute runtime, but every detail of the record feels fully fleshed out, and nothing overstays its welcome.

This is truly the work of a band who, three albums in, has figured out their sound and how to keep innovating and improving upon their previous work. Hopefully, the title of the record is simply an artistic choice, and Chamber will continue to make distilled audio chaos for many years to come. All other albums coming out for the rest of this year have massive shoes to fill.