One week after moving into a new apartment, I was cooking dinner when the unit\u2019s fuse box abruptly burst into flames. I ran around the apartment alerting my roommates and looking for a fire extinguisher but returned empty-handed, an oversight by the landlord that turned my spine cold. One roommate called the fire department, others shoved belongings into backpacks, and I alerted our neighbors: a single father with kids upstairs, a reclusive woman below, strangers I\u2019d never even passed in the stairwell. As residents escaped, I grabbed a broom that had caught fire and whacked it against the floor until the embers went out, threw every object within the fuse box\u2019s radius into the opposite room, and ran.<\/p>\n
Your priorities come into focus fast when there\u2019s a fire you can\u2019t control. If you\u2019re lucky, time is on your side and nobody is harmed. It was for me and it was for Robber Robber<\/a>: a fire ripped through the Vermont band\u2019s apartment complex in Burlington last winter. Their unit was the only one spared, its interior still intact like a Thorne miniature room on charred stilts, but the landlord condemned the building and its residents were displaced. For months, Robber Robber crashed on the couches of friends and fellow artists, including Greg Freeman<\/a> and Lily Seabird, before eventually climbing into an unused attic for temporary shelter. They had just begun working on their second album, Two Wheels Move the Soul, before the catastrophe took place, so they posted up permanently inside their own music\u2014one of the few things within their control.<\/p>\n No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Sound It Made\u201d opens Two Wheels Move the Soul like the blaze is roaring to life before your eyes. Zack James\u2019 shifty drumming hammers out a drum \u2019n\u2019 bass redux like a panicked heartbeat while Carney Hemler\u2019s bass lurches in slow motion, replicating the gut drop of a horrible realization. Singer-guitarist Nina Cates pieced together the lyrics in what she calls a \u201ccollection collage,\u201d pulling from memories and journal entries she wrote during the period after the fire. Seemingly detached observations on weather and people-watching are flanked by an assortment of entities\u2014sports radio, a smiley-face takeout bag, the trolley problem\u2014that seem random until you realize the chaos is the point. \u201cI don\u2019t wanna get stuck like this,\u201d repeats Cates, yearning for routine and calm.<\/p>\n Robber Robber don\u2019t relive their apartment fire in literal terms on the album or dramatize the months spent living out of suitcases. Instead, they fill their songs with more oblique references to support systems, trash and grime, the insatiable need for stability\u2014processing how class and community inform the experience of displacement. Gratitude for having a place to close your eyes doesn\u2019t erase the loneliness of nomadic living. It\u2019s especially true in Vermont, where wealth disparities separate generational blue-collar families from the snow bunnies and post-pandemic homeowners chasing the state\u2019s idyllic stereotype in the face of a homelessness crisis<\/a>. Rearrange her lyrics and Cates\u2019 intentionally fractured scenes clearly flit between the trepidation, despair, and resigned acceptance familiar to certain locals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One week after moving into a new apartment, I was cooking dinner when the unit\u2019s fuse box abruptly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[776,88,216,777],"class_list":{"0":"post-563474","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}