The saga of San Jose stoner rock titans Sleep is as strange and sordid as the slow, dread-ridden dirges that they have become known for throughout the course of their convoluted career.
From their inauspicious beginnings as anarcho-punk band Asbestosdeath to their premature dissolution and subsequent decade-plus of inactivity, the narrative that runs alongside each of the group’s releases reads like some ancient inscrutable parable pulled from the pages of a preternatural text.
Their 1991 debut ‘Volume One‘ immediately helped to cultivate their catastrophic image, to the point that shortly after it was issued guitarist Justin Marler mysteriously disappeared, only to turn up sometime later as a monk in an Eastern Orthodox monastery. The remaining members – Matt Pike, Al Cisneros, and Chris Hakius – blindly mailed out a demo of their latest work to Earache Records, who then released the recording as is, resulting in 1992’s genre-defining ‘Sleep’s Holy Mountain‘.
Hoping to capitalize on the success of this seminal effort, London Records signed Sleep to a lucrative contract and offered an aggressive advance for their next record. The band responded with an album that consisted of one track; a sprawling 63-minute doom metal epic entitled ‘Dopesmoker‘. The label refused to release the record on several different occasions, and the group remained in obstinate limbo, ultimately choosing to disband rather than deliver a more marketable product.
Over ten years later and things have changed. Cisneros and Hakius formed experimental rock group Om, Pike earned accolades as the heavy metal guru behind High On Fire, and in 2003 Tee Pee Records eventually released the original version of ‘Dopesmoker‘, which in the end received all the critical acclaim it should have gained some eight years earlier. As a result, Sleep has finally lumbered out of deep hibernation, joining forces once again (albeit with Jason Roeder of Neurosis replacing Hakius on drums) to play a smattering of festivals and small venues in the past two years, the last of which came Sunday night at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.
The trio lived up to the legend early and often, supplying a powerful and punishing set of drop-tuned guitar, fuzzed-out bass, and earth-shattering drums that left every ear in the building with a resonating ring to remember it with. Unlike many of their speed-obsessed counterparts, Sleep has always focused more on ambiance and volume, both of which were stressed heavily throughout, whether it was from the backdrop of shifting visuals or from the six Marshall half-stacks that carried Pike’s riffs right up into the rafters. Above all else, the display was loud – inexplicably, almost uncomfortably loud; the type of loud you don’t quite hear as much as feel.
Despite the obvious reliance on inherent intensity, their songs still managed to incorporate some mastery of melody and innovation. ‘Dragonaut‘ began with an early-Sabbath psych-blues guitar lead and ended with a spaced-out jazz-funk bass solo that Cisneros effortlessly delivered in a near catatonic daze. ‘Aquarian‘ employed a series of breakdowns, build-ups, and tempo changes, while ‘From Beyond‘ was an engrossing mixture of airy atmospherics and all-out aural assault that kept the crowd captivated for well over ten minutes.
For the instrumental ‘Nain’s Baptism‘, both Pike and Cisneros vanished behind the wall of amplifiers, plucking their strings ever so slightly while Roeder went to work on his kit with just his hands, proving that even at a bare-bones minimum these three were still an irrepressible force to be dealt with.
Yet still, Sleep is without a doubt at their best when they reach their harshest, most repetitive, hypnotizing heights, and nothing comes closer to capturing that effect more than ‘Dopesmoker’. They didn’t play the song/album in its hour-long entirety, instead opting to bookend the set with extended excerpts. The final passage was an exploding earthquake of drone and distortion, looped over and over again until the line between quiet and loud became irrelevant, so much so that the deafening trance gave way to an almost eerie calm.
That calm then shifted into a cacophonous collage of horrible noise and twisted feedback. Sleep walked off amidst the chaos, leaving the audience to stare at the empty stage and endure the sonic terror until the inevitable encore began. Except the encore never came, and given the band’s mythical history, who knows if it ever will.
(Beau De Lang)
