Album Review

Embrace

Sleepy Sun
Embrace

[ATP; 2009]

7.5

Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala

Eddie Van Halen once remarked that the most amazing thing about Led Zeppelin was that, for a band often cited as the godfathers of heavy metal, so much of their repertoire was acoustic. Theirs was a reputation built not on being the loudest band all the time, but rather at just the right time. It's a lesson that San Francisco-via-Santa Cruz sextet Sleepy Sun have taken to heart-- their debut album, Embrace, dispenses its earth-quaking riffage in such carefully measured, perfectly spaced-out rations, it tricks you into thinking the band is much heavier than it actually is.

Their long hair, nature-kid press photos and onstage face paint seemingly align Sleepy Sun with San Fran's tie-dyed tradition, but the band's palette is actually smeared with a whole lotta Blacks: Sabbath, Mountain (whose producer, Colin Stewart, works the boards here), Angels and-- when singer Bret Constantino busts out a boogie-summoning wail on "Snow Goddess"-- even the Crowes. But if the opening "New Age" establishes Sleepy Sun as archetypal stoner-rockers-- with Constantino's vaporous vocals floating atop a subterranean fuzz bassline, molten guitar leads, and drum fills that roll right off of Bill Ward's tom-tom rack-- the song's follow-up, the surprisingly affecting piano-based spiritual "Lord", shows the group has designs on writing songs that still move you after the drugs wear off, and that Constantino can be the sort of emotionally assertive vocalist who doesn't always have to hide behind the haze.

The rest of Embrace plays up that oppositional tension-- namely, the question of whether Sleepy Sun will follow unruly acid-rock trailblazers like Comets on Fire down the volcano (as suggested by the sudden fuzz-punk eruption of "Red/Black"), or clean up their act and join fellow reverb junkies My Morning Jacket in the Dark Was the Night-tier indie ivory tower (see: the paisley-hued pastorale "Golden Artifact", wherein the band's former standing as a Fleet Foxes opening act makes most sense). To their credit, Sleepy Sun never let on as to which way they're going to lean, and seemingly build their centerpiece track "White Dove" as a monument to their own contradictory mystique. Clocking in at over nine minutes, it's the song that all the others here are in service to, capturing the band at their most sludgy and sinister before eventually fading into a blissed-out psych-folk denouement. And in the middle of it all: a drum solo. But then that's just the sort of 1970s-reverent gesture you'd expect from a group of hippies who, as of last year, were generously giving this album away for free over the Internet, but probably agreed to issue it on a proper label just so they could hear it on vinyl.

— Stuart Berman, June 16, 2009


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