Music / Sleeping States
Review: Sleeping States, The Cube
There the Open Spaces is a gorgeous alt-folk album by Sleeping States, AKA Markland Starkey. This year marks a decade since its release, and luckily for us, Markland has chosen to celebrate with a small run of shows in which the album is played in full. Last night, The Cube was blessed with an intimate (and very much sold out) performance put on by the good people of Bristol queer platform Thorny.
The lo-fi pop hits of Bristol’s own Palomica (AKA Nicol Parkinson) open for the main event, and the bedroom pop producer’s five-piece band deliver mechanical noises created by car keys swirled around an upside-down cymbal, wigged-out cosmic swirls via sped up tapes, and lots of sugary vocals tempered by a bloke with a box of wires. The songs are about various trembly feelings, and there are lovely field recordings filled with cricket-chirps all layered into a warm blanket of sound.
is needed now More than ever
Soon it’s time for the centrepiece of the evening: There the Open Spaces played in its entirety. As Markland’s guitar glints away under a spotlight an understated glamour pervades the cosy auditorium and the audience sits transfixed. Despite the overt DIY credentials of the original record, its allure almost sits in opposition to classically shaky DIY tropes: a timeless mystique is whipped up by the elegance of every element. Birdsong is recreated by whistling, choirs of synth cry out, and Markland’s voice is as arresting as ever. It’s endlessly enchanting.
Markland opens what would be ‘side two’ of the album with the relatively hi-tempo hand-clapping of September, Maybe and bemoans the fact the recording of There the Open Spaces was never pressed to vinyl. Surely this must have been a weird experience for the band – dusting off and practising songs that describe situations that are full of dreamy once-loves presumably left in the dust – but they are fully immersed in the music and a sort of hazy bubble of twinkling guitar and tape noise fully engulfs the audience as the drums kick in for the first time.
Though the songs occasionally lend themselves to small-scale improvised chaos, never once are the audience left adrift. We are gently led by the hand through retellings of Markland’s relentlessly romantic domestic dramas, being gripped as we go – and Markland and his band manage to maintain the magic of a gorgeous album seemingly effortlessly.
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