Album Review: Is There Anybody Home? by rum.gold
A divorce record from someone who never felt at home anywhere. Every room on it is empty, and he keeps walking through them anyway.
Delonte Drumgold spent most of his childhood shuffled between family members’ houses across Washington, D.C., singing in church choirs, playing trumpet from the fifth grade through a Berklee degree. He didn’t start performing his own material until he was 24, uploading tracks to SoundCloud under a name carved out of his surname (drop the D, lose the drummer association, keep rum.gold). His second LP, U Street Anthology, paid tribute to Black D.C., tracing the crack epidemic and poverty through his family’s block. Is There Anybody Home? goes somewhere harder to photograph. Made during a divorce, after relocating from Brooklyn to Lisbon, the record splits into two halves as “loosely adulthood and, more or less, childhood.” Part two came out first, as a standalone EP. The full sequence puts the grief in a different order. Adulthood up front, the childhood root system underneath.
On “Is It Something I Said,” the opening image is a cavity between two people in a bed, and the first decision is whether to sleep or see how deep it goes. rum.gold co-directed a music video for the track based on an episode of Hoarders, about a mother afraid her son will inherit her compulsions—he called it a metaphor for the mental clutter passed between parent and child without anyone choosing to carry it with his falsetto floats over a low, percussive hum. “Blessed Me with a Broken Heart” pushes the feeling further. He’s walking toward an altar, unsure whether it’s a wedding or a funeral, and by the second half he’s stopped pretending he doesn’t want to cause pain.
“Asleep at the Wheel” runs on a driving conceit that could collapse if it were played any bigger. Instead it turns inward, the verses slipping into a spoken breakdown (“I’m not sad/I’m numb/I’m dead inside/High beams are on in broad daylight”), clipped, flat fragments that strip the melody away entirely. It’s the one moment on Disc 1 where he quits trying to make the hurt sound pretty. The title track drops the question “is there anybody?” against candlelight and peeling paint, a telephone that keeps ringing, smoke stains on the walls. He says he doesn’t need his father back, tells his mother he’s grown, and then admits he’s been stuck running through the same doors his whole life. The place in the lyric isn’t a metaphor. It’s just a house, the kind where new paint covers old stains but the layout stays the same.
Producers Aire Atlantica, Frankie Scoca, Rahmm Silverglade, and Zak Khan built beds for rum.gold’s voice that stay wide and low. He wanted vocal clarity at the front while the instruments carved out space behind it, and you can hear that priority in the mixes. His phrasing sits close to the ear while the beats pull back, rarely competing. Years as a jazz trumpet player show up in how he bends a note just past the pocket, lets a vowel decay before it should, leaves gaps where another vocalist would double down. “Friend of a Friend” stacks questions—do you love me enough to lie, to stay, to tell me goodbye—and lets each one hang before the chorus pulls them into a single resigned admission:
“I never wanted it to end this way
With you and I right back to where we began
Yeah, you were still a perfect stranger then
Another friend of a friend.”
The inventory on “Love Me Better” runs three times across the track, good guy, bad side, fiend, human, not a savior, not a king, each pass shedding the performance a little more. By the third, he’s looking off in the distance, trying to find what’s missing, and the self-catalog turns from introduction to headstone. “Good Bones” seals with both parties having lied, both having said it would be okay. First he admits he lied for them, then he thanks them for lying to him. He’d gladly break his heart in two so half belongs to them. If he ever sells this broken place, he’ll tell them it has good bones. The kind of line that would crumble if the singer didn’t believe it.
rum.gold told Office Magazine that creating music is one of the rare moments where his insecurities leave the room. On Is There Anybody Home?, the room is still mostly empty, with low ceilings, bad paint, and a phone nobody picks up, but what he put inside it says precise, unglamorous things about what people do to each other when love stops being enough. U Street Anthology looked outward, at a city. This one looks at the floorboards.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Walking Dead,” “Is It Something I Said,” “Good Bones”