Exsanguinated Roommate: Healing Trends

With so much new music and (pardon the pun) outside noise from sources demanding certain releases need your immediate attention, it’s as hard a job to maintain equilibrium as to concentrate on one specific thing at a time. It’s the reason why certain new releases don’t exactly fall by the wayside but given the lack of time afforded to offer them the attention they deserve, it’s a process that simply can’t be rushed.

Perfect case in point is Paul Foreman’s brainchild, Exsanguinated Roommate, who in August returned with the second instalment in as many years. The first being Lurking, and if it was the sunshine that thawed out the icy February cold of 2024, then Healing Trends was the extra light that helped draw out the summer for a couple of extra weeks.

Sonically Anglophilic, the Chicago-based Foreman has spent the decade pivoting from the excellent underground supergroup Salisman… to the Chicago grunge-laden post-hardcore of Soft Speaker (who also released the Rippling Tapestries LP this summer). All intriguing endeavours, however, it’s through the Exsanguinated Roomate guise that sees Foreman really getting down into the groove.

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Healing Trends is an album that illuminates the existential crisis, which grows more familiar as we all get a little longer in the fang. This is amplified on Sombre – a slow lament that examines the isolation from one’s own actions. It’s like the pub dweller everyone avoids after their fourth pint where things get a little bit chippy and dark. This uneasiness filters all throughout Healing Trends, but like he always does – along with some help from Sailsman left tenants, Jon Raedeke and Chris Tate – the sonic juxtapositions lift the gloom, led by Methodical which focuses on depression, but possesses the kind of chiming dreamscapes to lift you out it.

It all starts with the woodsy, soft-stringed lament and saccharine whisper of Velvet Interior. Ultimately the embodiment of the Exsanguinated Roommate experience, in which Foreman harnesses the always-different-always-the-same mantra as that jangling psychedelia fully takes hold. Which is where Here Again comes in as Mersey psych echoes with some added Lee Mathers fairy dust reach every corner of the room. In truth, it’s the kind of song The Coral should be writing instead of limping towards that perilous path to mediocrity.

There are new colours in the Exsanguinated Roommate patchwork that reveal new themselves, too –  Altar in the Woods, held together with an electronic pulse akin to King of Limbs-era Radiohead, while Two Broken Spheres is informed by the most vital elements of the Salisman canon, as layers of instrumentation hoist the song up from the studio floor.

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Foreman always like to throw in an epic, and Pinwheel Kept Its Sparkle is that moment. 10 minutes of motorik chug and gentle strumming that opens space for his trademark melodies, and from here it’s an open field for Exsanguinated Roomate to roam. Again, Foreman leans back into world of Salisman with closing cut, Out to Pasture. With slow, rich inflections of guitar, it’s jangling splendour informed by cinema, vast space and nothing but solitude in it.

Foreman’s artistic adventures have been something of a square peg in a round hole. Perhaps hamstrung of locale, whether it be through the lens of Salisman or Exsanguinated Roomate, how his music doesn’t reach wider frontiers is one of the great mysteries from the underground. His songcraft, streets ahead of his jangle-inspired adversaries, and even bringing it back to Liverpool, it’s almost like the Jimmy Campbell effect. Healing Trends is another to add to a mystery that simply shouldn’t be, but for those already strapped in for the ride, it’s another worthy of your time.

Healing Trends is out now via Cruel Nature Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.