Staff Reviews

Ought - Room Inside the World

Review by Lee Adcock

Room… remains Ought’s most beautiful – yes, beautiful – album to date»

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On Room Inside the World - Ought’s third album and first for Merge - growing up doesn’t mean mellowing out so much as it means learning to pay attention, listening carefully and openly, staying somewhere long enough to really understand where you are. This album explores themes that have always concerned the band - identity, connection, survival in a precarious world - but with a bolder, more nuanced sound palette. Vibraphone, justly intonated synthesizers, drum machines, and a 70-piece choir suffuse the precise post-punk breakdowns that spangled Ought’s first two albums, giving rise to an emotional complexity that pushes their characteristically taut sound to greater depths.

On Room Inside the World, Ought gnaw at questions that have hovered around their music since they first began playing: How do you live in this world without destroying yourself? What is it that we can do for each other to make the lives we’ve been given easier? Room Inside the World steps away from the nervousness and irony that characterizes Ought’s previous records. Instead of winkingly asking you to open your textbooks, as on More Than Any Other Day, here they’re imploring you to look inside yourself and then around you, to tease out and melt away the barriers that keep people separated from one another. It makes for a different kind of catharsis: the quiet satisfaction of a job well done, the glow of seeing someone as they are, the soft simmer of real love.description from www.roughtrade.com