About Guilty Rainbow (2011):
Admittedly, Guilty Rainbow isn’t really a ‘concept album,’ and yet it’s got more of an arc and sense of unspoken redemption than most contemporary albums that parade themselves as such. It’s also one of those rare albums that starts out great and gets better over its 45-minute length.
-Collin Anderson, Tiny Mixtapes
Chicago via Brooklyn’s Kent Lambert has been recording under the name Roommate for about a decade, but now has a set of collaborators playing along with his moody electronic compositions, giving some serious depth to his already strong songwriting. Despite the companionate band name, and the significance of the group on this record, the importance of isolation, unusual fragility, and unanswerable questions are the more vital, weighty issues at hand.
-Adam Kivel, Consequence Of Sound (4 of 5 stars)
The tracks on Roommate’s new Guilty Rainbow often follow a pattern — foreboding, albeit calm, intros, with Lambert trying to keep a lid on his inner turmoil as the music escalates, and then an inevitable breakdown in both sound and singer. Yet the somewhat predictable execution of songs does not diminish the project’s unconventionalism. Guitar rock is turned on its head with electronic landmines and further distorted with the likes of vibraphone, banjo, autoharp and violin. And for his part, Lambert is appropriately volatile at the microphone, creating an unlikely co-dependency between man and machine.
-Chuck Campbell, Knoxville News Sentinel
"Guilty Rainbow is a culminating step forward for Chicago’s Roommate... Kent Lambert, the man behind the words and music, has finally consolidated his band into a consistent four-piece, and Guilty Rainbow bears the marks of a more active level of cooperation among the contributors. Bassist Gillian Lisée, multi-instrumentalist Luther Rochester and drummer Seth Vanek add a welcome bit of musical muscle to Lambert’s understated vocals and forceful lyrics... the new release finds Lambert cultivating his strengths—a no-frills delivery and fluid, organic verses that roll into one another with an easy inevitability."also on Popmatters: "After the Boom: An Interview with Roommate"
-Dylan Nelson, Popmatters
"The full orchestration of Roommate’s arrangements, which often include strings or banjos or any number of sundry instruments, never grows to a weighty density, but revels in its own understatement. That suits Lambert, though. His voice sticks to a mid-range croon, and delivers his wry lines dryly. Though Roommate has grown to a full band that favors larger, multi-part arrangements, the band has never shed its bedroom origins. This is headphones music, rainy day music, quiet longing music."
-B. Reed, Columbia Free-Times
"Roommate’s keyboard-and-drum-based tracks often seem cautiously bemused. It’s not just the floating-but-not-spacey sonic décor of nearly funky shuffling folk-pop, heavy-weighted quasi-rhythms or effects that are lightly industrial (i.e., tape-machine abuse and studio squonks). Kent Lambert sings as if he just discovered a lost song-trove of prime-period Todd Rundgren and early Steely Dan piano ballads, but his band helps him imbue the results with the not-quite-post-irony that has come around in the intervening years. Ultimately, of course, this is all Brian Wilson’s fault, but the Chicago-based Roommate likely won’t directly reveal that when they play Zanzabar — they’ll be too busy re-creating the odd, headphones-demanding sound of its new album, Guilty Rainbow."
-T.E. Lyons, LEO Weekly
"...the album is a seething exercise in survivalist restraint, like “Trust No One” manifest as a cold, sad reality of existence. Like the pre-cannibal knowing full well what the Apocalypse holds. Like the cannibal in the post-Apocalyptic wasteland who can only stomach feeding off himself.
Guilty Rainbow still seems to be about activism, imperialism, our dying world, and being the activist who insufferably bemoans U.S. imperialist actions all across our dying world, but it feels like it’s about struggling with the grand existential weight of caring in the first place. It’s all in the title, Guilty Rainbow: the shift in perspective required to feel OK about oneself in times like these; something briefly simple and good overshadowed by something eternally difficult and bad… bad like a devastating storm, or war, or heartbreak, or crappy top 40 radio, or an endlessly talented musician seemingly never able to catch a break, or a seemingly endlessly talented musical criticism site that just can’t get its shit together. Guilty Rainbow harnesses everyday grievance and bakes sweet, magnanimous pop music from its evil ohms.
Guilty Rainbow is one of the most rewarding “growers” I’ve come across this year, an album that revels in texture and instrumental glut—from vibraphones to violins, autoharps to Music Easels, key-tars to Game Boys—while terrified of indulging either one.
Guilty Rainbow is a fantastic achievement from a band that’s always had one in them, and as I said before in so many words that I’ll now say again in so many different ones: there is little else more gratifying in being a fan of music than watching a musician, with every successive album, build upon his or her potential in such an exquisite, dedicated way that everything about their music is now a magnificent improvement over what came before. Roommate’s third album is all that. And if I’m allowed any advice regarding the impending Final Days: it’s worth whatever time you have left."
-Dom Sinacola, Cokemachineglow
"...a careful tension exists throughout the album, something where everything seems on the verge of fraying, from structure to sentiment; there's a genteel, suffused sonic air that makes everything seem sunny, but the sentiments and sounds are often anything but -- guitars as nervous scrapes, deep-voiced murmurs and moans, lyrics that betray confusion and unsureness, even as everything grooves along."
-Ned Raggett, All Music Guide
...a semi-depressing tour de force, lush with loneliness and rife with repression.
-Marah Eakin, A.V. Club Chicago
An autumnal tint haunts this collection, like the ominous moan snaking through “Soft Eyes” and “Ghost Pigeon.” Washy undertones throb beneath more organic textures, all of it flecked with unpredictable electronics. Lambert’s a gifted lyricist, examining over and again his unique set of curiosities in these quirky arrangements. When he floats the dark lyric “We won’t feel better / When the winds of change have changed to lazy clouds” on the simmering glitch-pop nugget “Snow Globe,” it’s hard not to get lost in the ennui. Credit Roommate with crafting an album that’s as creepy as it is catchy, even if it is the most cynical thing this side of a Steely Dan record.
-Areif Sless-Kitain, TimeOut Chicago
Almost orchestral in its use of unusual instrumentation and sounds, Roommate layers its way toward a twisted vision of pop perfection. At times, these songs actually achieve levitation.
-Jon Worley, Aiding & Abetting
Where groups like Mercury Rev and The Silent League conjure up images of fantasy worlds, Roommate’s songs have a familiarity which is entirely earthbound. 'Guilty Rainbow’ is a lesson in how to expand your musical ambition without losing the ability to convey intimacy.
-Jonathan Leonard, Leonard's Lair
[FEBRUARY 2011 INTERVIEW w/ CHICAGOIST'S JON GRAEF]
[FEBRUARY 2011 INTERVIEW w/ CHIRP'S ERIK ROLDAN]
[MAY 2010 INTERVIEW w/ AMOEBA RECORDS' ERIC BRIGHTWELL]
It's not often that you can recommend a band to both Neil Young fanatics and Air fans. But Roommate splits the difference between intriguing, sometimes wistful lyricism and dark, dreamy electronic soundscapes.
-Ben Rubinstein, Centerstage Chicago, May 28, 2010
About We Were Enchanted (2008):
The album title, We Were Enchanted, holds all the keys. It starts with fantasy not as escapism but introspection and ends with a promising new direction for groupthink. Lambert finds enchantment not in fantasy outside of reality but in the strange fantasies that teem beneath reality, the oozing stuff that dreams are made of. To explore this territory on a purely personal level is indulgent in an honorable enough, sabbatical-type way but to join with a host of peers in mining those depths for some kind of transcendent commonality, some communion, some community…that shit’s dangerously close to sublime.
-Chet Betz, Cokemachineglow (best of 2008 write-up)
The songs build and grow, only collapsing just before they've reached their zenith; it's a living, breathing work, one that develops and grows with the passage of time and with the listener, a complete but not completed picture, leaving room for interpretation and exploration and all the other things that make truly good music so lasting...
- Marisa Brown, All Music Guide
...lush, subtly textured mini-symphonies of pop abandon.
—Jennifer Kelly, Popmatters
...mature, serious rock like Joel Phelps-era Silkworm as pushed through a computer.
—Doug Mosurock, Dusted
...When Lambert and the band sing “We’re all real tired of the shitty stuff,” the words seem to sum up their determination to survive and even be happy in a hopelessly messed-up world, pursuing the kind of modest, local, cooperative effort that’s helped Roommate flourish.
- Miles Raymer, Chicago Reader
We Were Enchanted sees the Chicago collective taking a huge step forward and truly embracing their spirit. While Kent is still the principle songwriter, the whole album simply feels like a whole album, as made by likeminded people grooving on their own vibe.
- Alan Ranta, Tiny Mix Tapes
Kent Lambert and Co. are well known for combining acoustic songwriting akin to Neil Young with disparate electronic rhythms. We Were Enchanted finds the Chicago-based band doing more of this, and lyrically, Roommate is at its best here, exploring weighty subjects about the times in which we live, but completely avoiding condescension.
- Jennifer Marston, XLR8R
If we rolled credits here, the credits would be a simple font, white on black, all-caps with just the slightest serif curls, like Spring had begun to flower (which it has), like today had begun to tomorrow (which it has), like our lovers all sing in birdsong (which they do), like our whistles are small hymns (which they are), like a gathering of friends, all singing together, is equal to a climax, is all you need in a life to make it a story, to make it have mattered & rung, rung, rung.
- Sean Michaels, Said the Gramophone
About New Steam (2007):
Really, this [Shrug Records limited edition 10"] is a piece of art to own.
- James Ziegenfus, Transmission @ Gaper's Block
It's an interesting move from Songs the Animals Taught Us, focusing more on chords and orchestral-like arrangements rather than computerized wanderings, and, at least in four tracks, promises for an interesting future.
- Marisa Brown, All Music Guide
About Songs The Animals Taught Us (2006):
...as you listen the beats become stranger, more compelling and more fragmented, and lyrics that at first seem harmlessly nonsensical turn out to be full of barbs about consumerism and life in wartime. It's a somewhat inscrutable album, and one that never fully declares its purpose or settles into any easily graspable pattern, but it's a more intriguing listen for that inscrutability.
- Thomas Bartlett, Salon.com, July 11, 2006
Lambert's political convictions do not detract from his distinctive musical talent. He succeeds in creative combinations involving a fuzzy, synthesized percussion underneath live instruments like banjo, saw, and xylophone, that blend together to define Roommate's signature sound-an intelligently arranged digitized symphony.
- JR, RE:UP Manual #11, July 2006