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But when any song breaking the five-minute barrier is liable to be labelled "progressive" or "stoner rock" by a simple virtue of time and guitars beyond the requisite three chords, shedding the tags is always going to be difficult.
It won't come as a surprise, then, that the band's second album, Fever, has built on the immense, psychedelic promise of its predecessor and delivers with an equally panoramic somnolence. Inspired by the undulating hills of Sierra Gold Country and the sunshine climes of California, it's an album draped in a languid, rolling spirituality that's as prone to weave and wander as it's capable of splitting the sky in two with an amplified thunder crack.
Dispensing with some of the fug that characterised Embrace, opener Marina crystallises the album's dynamism and diversity from the outset. Soupy riffs, Rachel Williams' ethereal, lingering vocal and a tribal breakdown to make Paul Simon smile don't so much as ease you in but drop you into the vivacity of a late night campfire in the bowels of the Sierra Valley. And, once again, Bret Constantino and Williams' sumptuous duets are a constant delight, snaking and intertwining along honeyed guitar work on Rigamaroo and delicately ducking the discordance on the more volatile Wild Machines.
The majority of tracks still lumber and lurch with freak-out guitar zeal but there's a noticeable balance as Open Eyes sweeps and soars in all the right places and the writhing, black stupor of Sandstorm displays everything that makes Black Mountain so mesmerising.
Sleepy Sun aren't above dispelling the perceptions of over indulgence, and they may always be tarred thus, but Fever at least proves there's a renewed clarity to go with the lozenge-smooth lethargy, even if it isn't totally clearheaded. --Reef Younis
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Customer Reviews
Opener `Marina' swings between desert rawk - all rattlesnakes and dust-bowl harmonica - and blissful folksiness before a total flip of script arrives in the form of swampy tribal rhythms and chanting that sounds like a New Age take on gospel. Perhaps it shouldn't work but somehow it does.
There is something faintly Espers about the folk pop of `Rigamaroo', while `Wild Machines' sets a slightly hokey scene by chucking in some Ennio Morricone whistling into a sonic mêlée that includes preposterously monstrous riffage. Elsewhere there is a desert sunrise comedown (the appropriately titled `Acid Love'), peyote-noir ('Open Eyes') and a hint of protest on the scattershot rhythms of `Freedom Line'.
Yet the highlight of the album is surely `Desert God', which shimmers into view like an improbable mirage. All heavily reverbed psyche-blues, it repeats the opening track's total wind-change with a thumping harmonica breakbeat of sorts before some delightfully squiggly guitar solos.
Fans of, say, Spiritualised and Brightback Morning Light should enjoy 'Fever'; it may even suit fans of My Morning Jacket's expansive early albums, albeit relocated from humid Kentucky to breezier Laurel Canyon. Recommended. First published at The Line of Best Fit.
At times like the theme to a long-forgotten spaghetti western, other times recalling the likes of Black Mountain, The Grateful Dead and even Fleetwood Mac, this is remarkably panoramic music that surprises and delights at every turn. It's often joyously over the top, some of the acid-rock wig-outs bordering on the uncontrolled, but at the same time it is those longer jams, notably "Sandstorm Woman", "Marina" "Wild Machines" and "Desert God" that are the most effective, conjuring up potent visual images and evoking the barren desert imagery to spectacular effect, coruscating in and out of focus like a mirage.
Original and impressive.
The only problem being is these guys at times sound SO much like Black Mountain it may confuse people as the male/female vocal delivery is almost identical.
I'm sure I'm not the only person to have noticed these similarities.
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