Sleep Biography - Sweetslyrics

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Sleep (originally Asbestos Death) were formed in San Jose (California) by singer/bassist Al Cisneros, guitarist Matt Pike, drummer Chris Haklus and a second guitarist. Volume One (Very Small, 1992), a collection of slow, dark, booming dirges, bridged doom-metal and stoner-rock. The music's gothic overtones wed hallucinated states of mind and the two become one deep coma. Every song is a gesture of mental apocalypse. Cisneros mumbles a witch's prayer over the heavy Black Sabbath riff of Stillborn. Guitar and bass deliver an epic and tragic melody towards the end of Suffering. Nebuchadnezzar's Dream erupts black lava.

Melody and harmony are mere accidents of playing instrumentation. In their hands, the slow-burning blues of Numb becomes a vision of unredeemed horror. A vaguely middle-eastern motive climbs out of Catatonic's trance.
Cisneros' mind is permanently blinded by a dense fog of drugs. The drums are as lively as zombie steps. The bass carries the melody to make it sound menacing and otherwordly. Guitar riffs pierce anything that moves in the viscid slurry.

The band was reduced to a trio for the EP Volume 2 (Off The Disk, 1991). The subsequent album Sleep's Holy Mountain (Earache, 1993) showed a more assured combo. Even if pomp still reigns unbridled (The Druid), tracks like Holy Mountain and Evil Gypsy are almost free-form, and Inside The Sun is chamber music for the doom generation. Dragonaut, From Beyond and Aquarian are no less entertaining (the way Dracula was entertaining to rats). While not very original, the album's sound is the quintessence of "stoner"-rock (Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer).

After a long hiatus, Sleep returned with the most ambitious work of their career. Jerusalem (Dopesmoker, 1998) contains one huge six-movement suite and represents one of the most extreme attempts at scoring the deepest torments of the human psyche.

Matt Pike has built a career of stretching out Black Sabbath's riffs in ultra-lysergic trances. With George Rice (bass) and Des Kensel (drums), the guitarist has created High On Fire and released Art Of Self Defense (Man's Ruin, 2000 - Tee Pee, 2002), an album that cruises at ever higher altitude. It was followed by Surrounded By Thieves (Relapse, 2002).

http://www.scaruffi.com/vol5/sleep.html

 



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