One week after moving into a new apartment, I was cooking dinner when the unit’s 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’d 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’s radius into the opposite room, and ran.
Your priorities come into focus fast when there’s a fire you can’t control. If you’re lucky, time is on your side and nobody is harmed. It was for me and it was for Robber Robber: a fire ripped through the Vermont band’s 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 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—one of the few things within their control.
No score yet, be the first to add.
“The Sound It Made” opens Two Wheels Move the Soul like the blaze is roaring to life before your eyes. Zack James’ shifty drumming hammers out a drum ’n’ bass redux like a panicked heartbeat while Carney Hemler’s 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 “collection collage,” 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—sports radio, a smiley-face takeout bag, the trolley problem—that seem random until you realize the chaos is the point. “I don’t wanna get stuck like this,” repeats Cates, yearning for routine and calm.
Robber Robber don’t 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—processing how class and community inform the experience of displacement. Gratitude for having a place to close your eyes doesn’t erase the loneliness of nomadic living. It’s especially true in Vermont, where wealth disparities separate generational blue-collar families from the snow bunnies and post-pandemic homeowners chasing the state’s idyllic stereotype in the face of a homelessness crisis. Rearrange her lyrics and Cates’ intentionally fractured scenes clearly flit between the trepidation, despair, and resigned acceptance familiar to certain locals.
