La Dispute – Rooms Of The House

If you can manage to collect a group of songs under a banner, and keep the listener not only interested, but really take that listener on a journey with you, then you can justifiably consider your work a success. This third LP by La Dispute tells us that there is “history in the Rooms of the House”, and this album is a break-up played out in the most painful and creeping of ways. Like the cold that gets in your bones, or the wind that pulls you apart. The agony of departure exposes the listener completely to the prelude and centre of the writer’s new life, approaching and then living with being alone.

Bands like The Van Pelt, and their successors The Lapse always made this kind of sound, but (sacrilege aside) I don’t know if I was ever fully convinced as a participant in those audiences, and that sound, as to whether they ever quite got to the intensity of feeling that is felt here. Perhaps its La Dispute’s historical hardcore influence that gives the lyrics that directness – nevertheless, we can hear Van Pelt/Lapse influences, but it’s mewithoutyou comparisons that chime the best here. Usually, we would describe m-w-y as peerless, but this could be the work that changes that.

“Would you fly out for my funeral?” is the question of a partner left behind, realising just what this split is going to mean, or not mean in the future. “Almost feel reborn” is expression of the emotion that accompanies the briefest of moments when the imminent break is perhaps forgotten. This LP is full of these occasions. Brutal, beautiful, bleak and mesmerizing in equal parts.

This LP is not to be listened to lightly. The value of this work probably owes as much to post-hardcore pioneers like Embrace and Rites of Spring; a poet for a singer is not an unhelpful accolade, and La Dispute are very hard to pin down as either instrumentally, or vocally led. This is a brilliant place for a band to be, and La Dispute have made a piece of work that makes the listener strain to hear the words, as well as sway with the crafted guitar lines.

You can’t help but be convinced that every single thing that happens here was entirely planned, and it creates something that can’t be tapped into and dropped out of in a way that as our internet addled brains have led us into. This is an LP to be involved in, to spend time with. Thank God that La Dispute know and value this approach; they understand that this way of making art is not just still wanted, but even while our lives fall apart, it is needed more than ever.

JON CURTIS