Sleepy Sun Raises Desert Gods

Our favorite track from UNKLE’s latest album featured a band called Sleepy Sun we hadn’t heard of. Interest duly piqued, we tracked down a copy of their forthcoming album Fever, due out June 1st.

We expected a second coming of Björk, but instead found a first coming of a truly exceptional psychedelic rock band, with power even a not-at-all-high, dyed in the wool hippie hater such as myself must bow before.

Fever opens with Marina, a six-and-a-half minute trek to rival Frodo’s, from a subterranean dwelling among sludge rockers such as The Sword and Bloodhorse, out into delicate poppy fields frequented by the likes of Sia and Lou Rhodes, through to a climactic, screaming funk rock jam with the energy to at least open for vintage Jane’s Addiction. And that’s just the first track!

Rigamaroo is a brisk strut down the driveway under crystal clear skies by comparison, though it fully displays the inspired chemistry not only between singers Rachel Fannan and Bret Constantino, but also between guitarists Matt Holliman and Evan Reiss.

The grungy, reverb-soaked Wild Machines brings the band back into the garage for a little shoegazing, but that’s not a dirty word when you can avoid the most common, and most fatal flaw of the genre; It’s not boring! It doesn’t get lost up its own ass without a compass or watch. It feels like a jam session, and paints with many colors on many surfaces just as a good jam should. However, the drums know when to drop out. The guitarists know when to switch their big muff pedals off. And the singers can actually sing, for Christ’s sake!

After the short and sweet Ooh Boy and the haunting interlude Acid Love comes the majestic winged reptile that is Desert God. It quietly slinks around in the scorched dust for the first couple of minutes, just Constantino’s carefully paced howling over the lightest riff and percussive accents. Then it  explodes, and takes flight, up into the hot, bone dry skies with a blazing harmonica solo and a thundering Zeppelin beat before giving way to bold, squealing guitar leads. It comes back down to earth with gentle Hendrix / McCready style noodling and a commanding final verse from Constantino, proving him to be every bit as formidable as Fannan as a solo vocalist.

Open Eyes is the first single from this album, and I understand why, as it’s arguably the most accessible of only a few tracks that are in the “proper” format, minding length and… digestability, for lack of a word that’s… well, actually in the dictionary.

It’s not the strongest cut by any means, but it serves the purpose of starting point just fine, and palates fond of prog-hippies such as The Mars Volta and Portugal. The Man should find it toothsome.

After the death valley roadhouse hymnal that is Freedom Line, the album closes with the nearly ten minute long Sandstorm Woman, not just a bookend complementary to Marina in scale and diversity, but also a sort of reprisal of the entire album’s strongest bits, from the harmonica serenade to Fannan’s soaring voice and a possessed breakdown where Constantino hollers like a preacher channeling the voice of a deity: “Break your love! / Fortify your soul!”

Approach this album as cynically as you wish; as cynically as I did if you’d like. It will surprise you. Sleepy Sun gets absolutely right what too many bands in their genre get wrong: Heterogeneity. These musicians communicate, but it’s always a new angle to the conversation, and there’s always a point. They go down into the rabbit holes, but there’s always someone holding a string leading back out. It’s the opposite of the tiresome excessive hedonism so common among the rest of the atmospheric hippie jam-happy noisemakers.