ZapTown

[Article by Stephen Cruze.]

Sleepy Sun
Embrace
ATP Recordings
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I remember being a kid around the mid-to-late ’70s and hearing bands that held some similarity to Sleepy Sun on the radio — Heavy Metal or Hard Rock with bands like Led Zepplin, Hendrix, and Cream.  Now if you turn on a Heavy Metal station you’re likely to get hit in the face with bands with shitty names like Linkin Park and Nickleback.  There is a soullessness to these bands.  The distortion is not as warm, the crescendos and mind-bending breakdowns are missing.

So when I listen to Embrace, the debut album by Sleepy Sun I’m reminded why the notion of selling your soul for rock-n-roll is so alluring, precisely because if you do, you’re led down psychedelic shores to where recording a record like this one becomes possible again.

With only eight songs in 44 minutes, Embrace reclaims the title of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal for me.  It leap-frogs easily over the mountains of idiotic mainstream radio-friendly heavy metal.  Psychedelic guitar tones, reverb-ed vocals, deep drum and bass rhythms with small smatterings of piano, acoustic guitars and harmonica reminiscent of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band build into some beautiful and slightly dangerous sounding songs.

Rock-N-Roll used to have a dangerous quality to those too old to understand it with the best bands being dangerous, as well as informed.  These days it’s hard to find a band that has both of those qualities.  Some bands today you feel are quite dangerous exactly because they are so void of any self-realization and others seem so literate that they’d be better off performing in a library rather than in a rock club.  So to Sleepy Sun I say thank you.  Thank you for having the balls to make a record like Embrace. I for one, think it stands at the front of the line of what defines Rock-N-Roll of our time.

Sleepy Sun