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Review: Sleep, SWX
Bristol sure loves its stoner metal funereally slow and crushingly heavy. When Sleep guitarist Matt Pike played this very venue a little less than a year ago with his other band, the somewhat speedier High On Fire, the place was comfortably full but not as rammed as it is with the anticipated metalhead/hipster mix for the revived legends of epic heaviness.
First up are Finns Pharaoh Overlord – an offshoot of prolific cultsters Circle and one of those post-everything experimental acts who chuck a bit of this’n’that into the brew, from stoner rock to Krautrock (former Faust fella Hans Joachim Irmler has bestowed his imprimatur by collaborating). They certainly produce a big noise, which is suitably hypnotic for this medicated audience. But closer inspection reveals that there are just two of ’em. Much of the sound, including some of the growlier vocals, is pre-recorded.
is needed now More than ever
Everyone comes to this stuff with their own reference points, but to these ears it occasionally sounds like one of those Dave Brock solo albums in which guitars join unequal battle with keyboards. Still, mainman Jussi Lehtisalo appears to play a beer belly solo with his hands at one point, and you don’t see that every day.
In lieu of an intro tape, Sleep treat us to around 15 minutes of lunar landing radio transmissions, which may be in keeping with the spacey theme of comeback album The Sciences but wears out its welcome fairly quickly. No matter, here comes the monster riffage of Marijuanaut’s Theme to remind us that their musical lineage goes back more than half a century, beyond oft-cited Sabbath to the original metal power trio Blue Cheer (anyone else remember seeing ’em aboard the Thekla when it was just a hull with a stage at one end?). It’s a bong-friendly primal stomp that stimulates the lizard brain to incite a sea of slo-mo communal headbanging, like the seedier metal equivalent of a Grateful Dead show.
Sleep are ferciously good at this stuff, in contrast to some of their musical fellow travellers (your correspondent must confess to finding the lauded Electric Wizard rather dull), having honed it to perfection prior to their long hiatus. The now older and gnarlier founding duo of reliably shirtless riffmeister Pike and beardy Al Cisneros, whose bass playing positively demands deployment of the cliché ‘gut-punching’, remain a formidable team, but it’s the recruitment of hard-hitting Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder that seems to have kicked the band up another notch. Frequently leading from behind, he’s all over his kit giving it plenty of toms and cymbals.
Anyone hoping for Dopesmoker/Jerusalem-era epics is likely to have been disappointed, as the show is dominated by recent material – though the trio do dip back to 1992 for Holy Mountain. Oddly, the only point at which the set seemed to drag was during the 16-minute Leagues Beneath: the longest of their post-2009 compositions, which loses its way somewhat in the middle section. But the likes of fabulously named highlight Giza Butler provide strong supporting evidence for claims that The Sciences is their finest album to date.
Naturally, they’re not permitted to leave without returning to Holy Mountain for the signature Dragonaut – the only crowd-pleasing anthem in rock that (on record at least) concludes with a bass solo. Long may they continue to toke.
All photos by Phil Watson
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: October 2019
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