Sleep - The Sciences
The Quietus
When Sleep reformed in 2009 at ATP’s second Fans Strike Back event in Minehead, Somerset, they ended both of their headline sets with what bassist and vocalist Al Cisneros introduced as “a new song from a long time ago” called 'Antarcticans Thawed’. Almost ten years later, here it is, the 15-minute centrepiece of this new album released by surprise today.
Who would have thought Sleep, of all heavy bands, would 'do a Beyoncé’ and drop this on us unannounced? But 4/20 is a sacred day for the Weedian and Sleep are their heaviest Gods. I stopped smoking marijuana thirteen years ago. I don't need to anymore: I listen to Sleep.
That Saturday and Sunday evening in May 2009, as the hour neared 3am, 'Antarcticans Thawed’ echoed out in a sparse and glacial sense of unfamiliarity – its riffs exerting the monstrous, deadly slow pressure of pack ice locking the audience in its grasp. On The Sciences, it is captured in a rich, re-hashed soundscape, the band sounding phenomenal. Because Sleep’s Holy Mountain was essentially a demo and Dopesmoker was not released in its full-bodied form until 2012, you can now revel in a band that has taken its sweet, hazy time getting its songs recorded the way they want them to sound.
Sleep have existed for the last ten years predominantly as a live entity – one that has become only more assured and more powerful, and central to stoner-doom mythology. The album begins with a glitchy, feedback-laced titular intro piece that recalls 'FX’ from Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 and the way guitarist Matt Pike opens up a lot of Sleep gigs: manipulating his guitar’s toggle switch as the rumble of the rhythm section begins to crescendo. With this sonic messing-about Sleep are telling us they have been experimenting in the laboratory-studio on their rare strain of heavy music, turning the art of thundering stoner rock into a science. And with that fusion of the two cultures, this album delivers the monument to their craft they have long promised.
'Sonic Titan’ is another new song from a long time ago – a scratchy bootleg-quality live version was available as a bonus track on the 2003 Tee Pee Records release of Dopesmoker – but here it has acquired all of the sheer heaviness Sleep have mustered playing live in a steady cadence of gigs since 2009. Their concerts see the backline stacked with Ampeg and Orange amplifiers. Last time I saw the band I counted six valve amplifiers each for bass and guitar, and was mesmerized watching their stagehand switch in new amps as others faded, the bulbs pulsing in the gloom. 'Sonic Titan’ lumbers, halts, alters direction and surges forward again before Cisneros hits a lively, pumping bass riff. His performance throughout the album sees him cut through the sonic morass in his typically dexterous, trancelike state. As Pike leans back into his trademark engine-revving riffs, Cisneros bucks and weaves around the shards of guitar lines. Cisneros’ vocals are close in the mix, with meditative intonation and lightly synthesized in a manner familiar from his work in Om.
By contrast, on 'Antarcticans Thawed’ he roars out in a broken-up incantation much like the way he sings on Dopesmoker. “Mountain’s highest point recedes” he spits: Sleep have always been about the arduousness of the journey, not so much slouching towards Bethlehem as powering towards Jerusalem. Each riff is dragged from oblivion, the horizon melting into the snow with the incandescent promise of madness. Original drummer Chris Hakius left the band again after that two-night ATP reunion, but Jason Roeder from Neurosis has occupied the position since: Sleep’s John Bonham to Hakius’ Bill Ward. His power and touch, sense of placement and rhythmic rough 'n’ tumble keep the geological plates spinning ever-so-slowly. But actually he’s more than that, laying down a line of ride-orientated cymbal work on 'Marijuanaut’s Theme’ you might expect from a jazz-fusion player. So he’s at least partly Sleep’s Billy Cobham.
Pike’s solo at the ten-minute mark of 'Antarcticans Thawed’ might be the best he has ever recorded. Greater even than his solo on 2014’s one-off single 'The Clarity’ or the titanic solos that periodically arrive as landmarks during Dopesmoker. After the retirement of Black Sabbath and Tony Iommi, the servant has truly become the master. In this solo, Pike draws heaviness from the melting permafrost, encased for millennia and surfaced in a tumult that delineates the Antarctic landscape: his guitar lines form seracs, drifts, pressure ridges and glittering ice pinnacles. 'Iommic Life complete’ indeed.
You might hear mentions of 'Zion’ and other quasi-religious allusions but really all the lyrics are about getting high and smoking marijuana, and that's fine. Although after calling the opening song 'Dragonaut’ on Holy Mountain, 'Marijuanaut’s Theme’ is really pushing it. 'Giza Butler’, a homophonic tribute to Black Sabbath’s bassist, invokes the ancient edifices of the pyramids – themselves a symbol for the power trio, the triangle of electricity – and the importance of the inner-high: 'Harvest sustains the altitude within’. Here the band gets as close as it does to bouncing, like a pack animal laden down with the good stuff. If I have a criticism of the song it's that the band sit back into a rather indistinct riffless churn without much melodic shape.
That changes with closer 'The Botanist’. Pike layers sharp, atomic blues over an acoustic backdrop which speaks to some of the more expansive pieces he has produced with his other band, High On Fire. The electric triangle then rotates on its axis as Roeder and Cisneros jam the song out to a reverberating conclusion.
With The Sciences, Sleep present an alternative pathway for the hyper-technological age. Elon Musk’s battery-powered ascent to the stars and colonisation of Mars be damned, perhaps we just want to get high and drift on a spacewalk. Sleep have finally delivered the soundtrack.
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Fri Apr 20 12:30:37 GMT 2018Pitchfork 84
The iconic stoner metal band’s first studio album in almost two decades is a twin ode to volume and weed. It makes everything that was originally great about Sleep even better.
Thu Apr 26 05:00:00 GMT 2018Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Sleep
The Sciences
[Third Man; 2018]
Rating: 4/5
[Note: I tried to give this album a 4.20/5, but my editor said it couldn’t be done.]
Following in the footsteps of doom and heavy metal forefathers Black Sabbath, Candlemass, and Saint Vitus, Sleep revitalized doom metal in the early 1990s with Volume One (1991) and Sleep’s Holy Mountain (1992). After touring and having gained some solid critical success, they set their sights on making a third record. Rather than trying to replicate the quick turnaround of Sleep’s Holy Mountain, however, the band decided to do something different: they spent the next four years smoking weed and writing an epic, hour-long song. At the end of that process, Sleep became embroiled in various legal battles, switched labels, and recorded the massive song over the course of one grueling month. As the well-known story goes, their label found the song to be unreleasable, so they cut it up into what would become 1999’s Jerusalem, a version dismissed by the band but accepted as canonical by others, such as Rolling Stone, who called it the 62nd best metal album of all time. After two further edits were released, a new version of the recording was unveiled in 2003 as Dopesmoker, which the band accepted as the closest of the four releases to their vision. Dopesmoker was the one that would, for most fans (including myself), advance into the pantheon of Great Metal Records.
Then, Sleep followed the prophecy laid out by the opening lines of Dopesmoker: they dropped out of life with bong in hand and didn’t release another album for 20 years. And after the decade-long hassle of creating Dopesmoker, who can blame them?
For Sleep, a band obsessed with weed, the fact that April 20 landed on a Friday this year must have been a bat-signal, and they heeded the call, reporting back in November that they’d finished a new album. Weed comes through all over the place in the catalogue of Sleep, a band that basically forced the term “stoner metal” into existence. It’s there in the imagery of Sleep’s Holy Mountain, the lyrics (and very title, duh!) of Dopesmoker, and much of The Sciences, including the album art, where an astronaut — sorry, a Marijuanaut — is smoking weed in outer space. Yet, being high is not integral to understanding or even liking their music.
Weed is often associated with detaching from the world, from society, even from ourselves, and it’s no coincidence that much of the weed imagery of The Sciences is paired with outer space — it’s the ultimate getaway. Sleep’s music aspires toward a particular kind of escapism, one that pairs drug culture with post-minimalism and heavy metal. And for the serious metalhead, the resulting music can, for better or worse, be extremely relaxing. “Sonic Titan” is one massive hook after another, mostly rocking back and forth between two tonal areas. Overall, it’s a fairly repetitive track that requires little from the listener; it could almost be called ambient. So, for the incapacitated metalhead, whether they’re stoned (not me, I’ve retired from that) or exhausted from being on their feet at work all day (me), this music is bliss. Beyond the album’s four hard-hitting, central tunes, The Sciences also sees Sleep reaching a bit outside of the Dopesmoker aesthetic, especially on drone opener “The Sciences” and album closer “The Botanist,” which is a beautiful, dark track that shows Sleep’s “tender” side, one that’s more versatile and sympathetic.
The bliss of listening to Sleep isn’t empty, though. The Sciences is good because, unlike a lot of music influenced by Black Sabbath, it distills the greatest aspects of Sabbath and presses them on into infinity: the huge riffs, the psychedelic backdrops, the wayfaring solos. “The Sciences” is Sleep’s “FX” (from Black Sabbath: Vol. 4). The bong rip at the beginning of “Marijuanaut’s Theme” obviously alludes to the “cough heard ‘round the world” at the beginning of Master of Reality, and the song later references Sabbath guitarist and co-founder Tony Iommi in its lyric, “Sojourns the lone stoned soul/ Marijuanaut loads a new bowl/ Behold as he enters the clearing/ Planet Iommia nearing.” The album also has an entire song dedicated to Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler (“Giza Butler”). Beyond these explicit references, The Sciences captures something essential about Black Sabbath’s doom in a way that feels fresh, its pastiche so overt that it doesn’t really feel pastiche at all. Sleep bet it all on the fact that listeners today basically just want to hear the same thing over and over and over again, especially if those people are metalheads and the music kind of sounds like Black Sabbath. In giving us exactly what we want in The Sciences, Sleep find a way to make the repetitive interesting or at least intoxicating in itself, which is no small feat. Against other contemporary “drug bands” like Phish, Dave Matthews Band, The Flaming Lips, and many EDM DJs, Sleep’s music actually seems to reflect a conscious immersion in the craft, the form, and the history. Or am I just being romantic?
Dropping out of life with bong in hand is not something I want to do, nor does it represent the aspirations of all Sleep fans — it’s just one form of an impulse that we all do share: the impulse to get out of this world, somehow. We may not want to smoke weed in outer space, but we still do want to sit around and listen to repetitive music. The sublimation drive is real — maybe it’s alcohol, maybe it’s video games, maybe it’s an addiction to Instagram and Facebook. At least Sleep are honest about their decision and are committed to seeing it through to its heavy, bong-rippin’ end. And by that standard, they’ve created another masterpiece. But, you know, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.