Before I meet Kent Lambert for the first time, he e-mails me a song he recorded and released in 2001. It’s called “RP (Forget the Metaphors),” and it saw some airplay on Belgian national radio in 2002. Audience members still requested it this year when he played a monthlong residency at the Hideout with a rotating lineup of bandmates. When we meet up and drink beers in the Ukrainian Village, Lambert tells me how it’s the song that motivated him to keep making music as Roommate, the project for which he’s collected his various musical impulses during the past decade and a half.
Those concerns—celebrity, escapism, power, suffering, alienation—now manifest in abstract language and stray references. One song on Make Like stems from a phrase he thought of in a dream: “Secret Claw,” two words that when put together form something both menacing and nonreferential. Sometimes Lambert still lapses into second-person perspective and accusatory gestures. On “Snow Globe,” a highlight from Roommate’s 2011 album Guilty Rainbow, Lambert sings, “If you’re someone who cares a lot about the problems of the world / What do you say to the other boys and girls? / Do you try to play it cool? / Or do you dare ask if they care along with you?”
Roommate isn’t an outlet of escape for Lambert—it’s a way for him to process experiences that often get codified into black-and-white talking points. He wants to see the shades in between the extremes. “I don’t want to tell people how to feel or how to think about these things, but I am trying to filter for myself things that might be horrifying or disturbing, that I might feel rage or anxiety about, and turn them into something that can be a meaningful experience,” he says. “We all are sharing in this culture and we all have our part in it. I don’t want to give myself an out.”
