‘Long Days? We’ve all had ‘em. If you’re working away this Good Friday you’ll doubtless be only too aware of that fact though here to haul you through are Belgian duo I will, i swear. Comprising cotton candy-soft voiced Fien Deman and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Van Landegem, the pair find themselves at the forefront of a new tide of Belgian talent prompted by the international prominence afforded Jarri Van der Haegen’s Disco Naïveté, I don’t doubt.
They’ve a couple tracks up on Unday Records’ SoundCloud the second of which, Sleep, recalls the muted grandeur of Sigur Rós and thus harks back to Van Landegem’s previous as part of Ghent’s primary post-rock outfit Say hello to my kids as Deman’s fragile, infantile vocal wafts wistfully atop wilting keys like the blue blob that bounds across timeless lyrics on karaoke screens worldwide. “Whenever you’re not OK/ I’ve got a place to stay/ I built it just for you” she keens with utmost conviction and were we able to make shacks from songs, I’d implore this oaky piece be your lumber.
Though it’s the swelling melancholia of Long Days – think a mainland European London Grammar translated into the desolate sparsity of Mew at their most subdued – which will likely whisk your breath right away. Incomparably affecting, and all the more so for a début from an act out of a municipality more renowned for its blogs than its bands…’
Posts tagged Sleep.
I’ll Be Your Mirror returned to northernmost London reach, boasting a quintessentially outré rundown which took in everything from thrash metal heralds (Slayer), sludge pukers (Sleep), sadcore progenitors (Codeine) and cutesy pop pairings (Tennis and to a substantially lesser degree, the Tall Firs). To quote pretty much every bloody band on the bill, “Thanks Barry; Deborah.” For finer weekends may now be few and far between…
Review: Friday, 25th May / Saturday, 26th May / Sunday, 27th May.
Gallery: Friday, 25th May / Saturday, 26th May / Sunday, 27th May.
‘Doomier and gloomier than DOOM in a darkened room stripped of all possessions, pot inclusive the song that is the album that is the song Dopesmoker is precisely what you’d desire and deem expected from a lucid, loosely intoxicated listen: more stream of (barely) consciousness than song per se, it drifts manically and at times maddeningly in and out of stodgy time signature and one heavily crunched chord pattern. And yet you sense that Sleep somehow manage never to fully overindulge as they quite so evidently have their lungs, for if an intensely potent experience it provides it never loses itself up the preferred orifice of any which Class B smuggler and nor does it partake in any form of artistically perilous overdose.’
Dots & Dashes review the long-awaited rerelease of Sleep’s stoner metal touchstone Dopesmoker…
