Roommate: "Don't Bomb the Moon"

At this very moment, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is hurtling soundlessly through the ineffable expanse of space at 5,592 mph, set to collide with the Moon on October 9th. Right: collide; fucking kamikaze-blast a crater six feet deep and about 90 feet wide into the already-a-crater Cebeus-A, right there on the pocked, pubescent dark-south face of our moon, raising a debris cloud at least six miles high so that NASA can follow with some sort of expensive contraption that will measure, mostly, traces of water-ice in the mushroom cloud of dust, if any, determining whether or not what was originally discovered in 1998 by the Lunar Prospector was just the signature of deposits from meteors or other flying space shit that already did what LCROSS will soon do. “Expensive” is relative in this case, if you can stomach that; the LCROSS mission costs only $79 million, small beans compared to most cosmic sci-fi the U.S. throws exorbitant funds behind, and the craft is cobbled together from loftier, more violent programs, those (sponsored by the Air Force) with rows of cute portholes expunging more satellites and more missiles leaving curlicue contrails before obliterating exotic non-Americans not in Space. I read this somewhere. Further relative phrases abound, of course, but in the end the plot is simple: a big hunk of aluminum will fly very, very fast into the moon, without fuel by the time impact occurs, and will leave a mark within an even bigger mark on a big hunk of rock already littered with and chewed apart by both man-made hunks and not-.

Armchair cosmic critic I am, I have trouble giving a crap about the Moon’s complexion or the inherent violence the act condones and seriously doubt, given what’s already transpired on the Moon, that this event will do anything to our psychic makeup or chthonic expectations about tides, seasons, and all that shit. So, as a protest song defending the Moon itself, Roommate’s “Don’t Bomb the Moon” does little to appeal to my bleeding heart priorities. That is, until Kent Lambert and co. are able to reach past the expository lyrics I’ve summarized above and relent, “I might be just a sentimental fool / But I don’t want those pricks to bomb the moon,” cutting through knee-jerk slogans about our celestial womb and annular fate to, over the course of four predictably fathomless, brooding minutes swarming with flutes and heavy planets of drums, with snaking synth and squiggling detritus, piss in the eye of most liberal gunk that passes as constructive criticism in, nearly, the past decade. Possibly the most vulgar song Lambert’s penned yet in tally of “fuck”s alone, “Moon” surpasses the utter triteness of what the song’s ostensibly rallying against (and what dontbombthemoon.com is proselytizing/shilling via hippie buzzwords like “missile” and “mother”) to reach a kind of hollow anger, resigned in its vagueness, spitting explicit the helplessness a guy like Lambert must feel every time he contemplates the colonialist leanings a squandered capitalist system like ours breeds in the supposedly best and last minds of our scat-loving nation. “Why do we have enough for bombs and bullshit songs and not enough for schools?” Yeah, OK.

Of course, any new material from Roommate is a cause to shoot fists towards the exploding heavens, especially when any new material is guaranteed to be meticulously produced, as rewarding as it is plodding, and rich with hidden, unexplored corners of melody and texture. Lambert’s voice is strengthening as he seemingly feels more comfortable leading an expanding band of Chicago talent, able to restrain the possibilities of, too often, walls of sound bent over the glut of what Roommate the Band could be, what with all these people about, and “Don’t Bomb the Moon,” sans some misplaced political fervor, is yet another prelude (after his entry in our Fantasy Podcast) to something fucking grand, and something fucking soon.

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