Sleep / Boris at Liquidroom, January 12th 2018



Daymare Recording is a Japanese label that specializes in the most experimental aspects of metal. For a few years they held a festival showcasing their artists named Leave Them All Behind, like the song from Ride. The last one was in 2015; that edition consisted of mostly local talent. This year they relaunched the event inviting Sleep to play in Japan for the first time.

Sleep played three shows, one in Osaka and two in Tokyo, along with Japanese bands Nepenthes and Friendship. For a couple of shows Mutoid Man also performed. I decided to go the show at Liquidroom. The opening band for this show was none other than Boris.

Boris is an amazing band and their live performances are a testimony of that. When I first saw them back in 2008, they closed with the Untitled song from the Smile record, one of my favorite songs of theirs’, a 20 minute opus of drone with power chords. I think that’s one of the things that help them rank among the best. In their music there’s a balance of thick (and awesome) drone, sludge metal mixed with melodies accentuated with power chords. Their song Farewell is another example, from the Pink album. This performance closed with it and after about an hour, they left the audiences wanting for more.

Boris showcased their latest (in my opinion, vastly underrated) album Dear from 2017. Sleep’s latest was released almost 20 years ago: Dopesmoker. David Rees, writing for the New York Times, describes it as “a Mark Rothko painting hitting you over the head with a bag of hammers”. The concept of this 63 minutes song is to translate to music the image of a caravan of ancient/futuristic priests plodding through the desert preaching the gospel of weed smoking. It’s large in scope and minimalistic in execution. The show opened with this tune.

After a 30 minute wait the distinct opening notes from Dopesmoker could be heard from behind the curtain obscuring the stage from the audience. After a few seconds the curtain opened revealing the band in full trance mode reproducing those sounds. They played about a third of the length of the recording. One thing I noticed during the show is that their music dynamics seem to be underrated. I do agree with the Rees’ witty metaphor but I’d say there’s a lot more subtleties in Sleep’s music. At times Al Cisneros’ will be the sole voice on stage playing walking bass lines up and down his Rickenbacker’s neck. To later be joined by Jason Roeder —who also drums for Neurosis- just riding that cymbal with a soft touch really close to a jazz pattern; basically swinging. And what could be said about Matt Pike’s command of the guitar on stage. I mean, the musicianship of this band is off the charts and they deserve props for that.

I’m also a big fan of their concept. Their intricate lyrics evoking religious imagery, combined with the space/sci-fi/futuristic references, reminds me of Su Ra and Parliament Funkadelic. These elements put them in a category of their own and prove that metal is way more complex than the often used “pounding” stereotype.

Nonetheless there was pounding of the utmost quality during the performance. In my opinion, Sleep grooves like the best of them; they’re not funk, but they do groove. It was interesting to compare both bands on the bill and their distinct approach to drone. While Boris stretched tempos until they were almost non-existent, in a way that Japanese traditional music does, Sleep locked in a relentless groove. It was atmosphere from a Japanese and American perspective.

Sleep performed for about an hour and 45 minutes. A tweet from Daymare Recordings after the concert quoted Al Cisneros saying that the three of them thought their show at Liquidroom was one of the best that the band have performed in years. It was truly an amazing one.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fishbone at The Garden Hall, August 19th 2022

Image
  Less than a year before the pandemic started I saw Angelo Moore walking in Shibuya. I checked, it was May 2019, the last time Fishbone came to Japan. I was on my way to work and saw him in front of Don Quijote. He was wearing a red fez hat just like you will see him wear in a video. I thought about approaching him, asking for a picture, but I was too shy. Not only was I not going to their show that evening, the truth is that I was not at all familiar with his band's output. In the nineties MTV Latin America had their collaboration with Los Fabulosos Cadillacs on heavy rotation. That was the extent of my knowledge of that band’s music. For some reason I wrote them off due to what I felt was an overwhelming hyper expressive frontman. Was I wrong; probably not about the hyper expressive frontman, but about writing them off as a novelty act. I corrected this wrong during the lockdown. First with the self-titled EP and then with the documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbon
Read more

Mr. Bungle at Toyosu Pit, February 28th 2024

Image
  I think I already mentioned that I used to host a couple of radio shows more than twenty years ago when I lived in Los Angeles. They were on KXLU, a station that broadcasts from the campus of Loyola Marymount University, my alma mater. One of them was a jazz show that went on the air on a weekday, I think Wednesday or Thursday. My co-host Joseph came up with the title ’The Gift of Jazz”. It followed an instrumental show that was hosted by DJ Ned. Ned’s show was one of my favorites, he introduced me to a ton of music. Two releases in particular, that he personally recommended while music played between the end of his slot and the beginning of mine, ended up being among my favorite albums of all time. One was the Ethiopiques 4 compilation with music from Mulatu Astatke -we’re talking years before the movie Broken Flower exposed these songs to the world. The other was a new release at the time, the album The Director’s Cut by Fantomas. That album, a four-piece rock band reinterpretat
Read more

Colin Currie Group plays Steve Reich at Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, April 21st 2023

Image
  Music for 18 Musicians is quite possibly the most accessible avant-garde piece of music ever. That doesn’t diminish its impact nor its complexity. It’s not accessible because it’s simple, it’s accessible because it connects with the listener on a primal level. The comings and goings of the bass clarinets and voices are like breathing, while the rhythmical throbs of the marimbas feel like the pacing of movement. This Pulses , as each of the sections are called, paint a complete and fascinating picture of human movement. It never ceases to engage through its one hour length. The ECM premiere recording, with the participation of the composer Steve Reich himself among the 18 musicians, is a classic. It’s perfect for relaxing, studying, as background music or for deep listening. I’ve been a fan of that recording for many years but I’ve only seen it performed live once. It was as a contemporary dance production. Rain , choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at Palais Garnier in Pari
Read more