Friday Full-Length: Sleep, The Sciences
Posted in Bootleg Theater on April 14th, 2023 by JJ KoczanWhat a day to be alive was April 20, 2018, when Sleep released The Sciences (review here). Five years ago as of next week. Their first studio album since they unveiled the complete Dopesmoker (discussed here) in 2003 and some nine years since their reunion first got underway with a couple sets at the curated All Tomorrow’s Parties fest playing their by-then-the-stuff-of-legend 1992 album, Sleep’s Holy Mountain (reissue review here), in its entirety. And they just dropped it. No fanfare, no advance notice. It wasn’t there and then it was. Like a Beyoncé or Taylor Swift record. Brilliant.
They had released the standalone single “The Clarity” (review here) in 2014, so it wasn’t the first new music from the trio of bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros, guitarist Matt Pike and drummer Jason Roeder — who had entire other careers going anyway in Om, High on Fire and Neurosis, respectively — but if it was ever going to happen, they were due after years of steady touring, fest appearances, a generation’s worth of influence on acts working almost entirely in their wake, and so on. The release was an event. All the more so because the record didn’t suck.
Self-produced with engineering and mixing by Noah Landis (Neurosis), The Sciences runs a statistically significant six songs and 53 minutes. Captured as a 2LP, it makes side-consuming highlights of its three longer tracks — “Sonic Titan” (12:27), “Antarcticans Thawed” (14:23) and “Giza Butler” (10:03); ordered on CD with the latter two switched — while bookending with the three-minute feedback titular intro “The Sciences” before the bong-hit-and-go beginning of “Marijuanaut’s Theme” (6:40) announces the actual start of the record, and “The Botanist” closes with a duly bombed jam, languid in its unfolding, topped with a ripper solo from Pike as one would hope, and brought to a deceptively gentle finish of drums and feedback.
Between one end and the other, Sleep lived up to and arguably surpassed the impossible expectations of what a new album from them could be. Dug into a stonerized mythology of lyrics that connected “Sonic Titan” (which had been around as a live track since Dopesmoker) to “Holy Mountain” and “Giza Butler” to signature pieces like “Dragonaut” and “Dopesmoker” — to which it seemed to be a direct sequel and a worthy one in its riff — The Sciences unfurled as slab-massive and addled, a hybrid-strain culmination of Pike‘s sativa energy and the mellow indica of Cisneros‘ vocal storytelling and proclamations of weed-worshiping brilliance like, “through Iommosphere chutes deploy capsule splash down on the T-H-sea/To raft/Row the hash oil leagues to shoreline,” from “Marijuanaut’s Theme” set to the only nod that could contain them in Roeder‘s rollout.
A triumph, then, by virtue of its existence as well as its substance. “Sonic Titan” is more riff than lyric, but picks up from the end of “Marijuanaut’s Theme” with a declarative purpose just the same and is hypnotic enough in its first five minutes before the bass introduces the verse line that when the vocals start the feeling of arrival is palpable. “Look onto Zion, though it can’t be seen/Man on the moon cannot help me see,” are the words, and they’re plenty since the focus is the lumbering riff that coincides and carries through the rest of the song, changing at around nine minutes in to give a bounce that serves well under Pike‘s solo and feels like a precursor to “Giza Butler” to come, while giving justification to what had only been a live bonus cut on the
2003 Dopesmoker CD before that.
Similarly, “Antarcticans Thawed” had been around for years by the time it showed up on The Sciences, played at shows and spread through various live clips and bootlegs. Again I’ll note that the vinyl puts it ahead of “Giza Butler,” which suits both its forward shove and the way its massive midsection builds on “Sonic Titan,” the jam-ish noise that ends establishing it that much more as its own side. That positioning is important because it also gives “Giza Butler” its due as the culmination of the album, which it very much is, stoned and drawn out at the start, most-righteous in its riff, Sabbath worthy in its putting-it-plainly payoff: “Marijuana is his light and his salvation” with a march that feels like they’ve been saving it for just such an occasion. Between the pterodactyl flying again and the CBDeacon, the shopping cart chariot and the Iommic Pentecost, the lyrics seem to answer “Dopesmoker”‘s exaltation to drop out of life with bong in hand by making the real world — guy living under a bridge getting high — no less epic than the ‘rifftual’ put on display by Pike, Cisneros and Roeder throughout. It is the full-bore manifestation of stoner metal glory. The apex. The communion. The tree that is also both the root and the leaf.
And then, because they’re Sleep and they can, they tack on “The Botanist” as a kind of half-song epilogue jam, to underscore the screw-it-let’s-get-high proselytizing by living it. Fair enough. The band would continue to tour throughout 2018 and 2019, and Third Man Records, which issued The Science, offered the complementary single “Leagues Beneath” (review here) in 2018 and the sprawling 4LP Live at Third Man Records (review here) in 2019. They ended that year by announcing they’d enter ‘Hypersleep’ — a till-whenever hiatus — in Jan. 2020. This of course would turn out to be well timed to everyone’s everything also taking a hiatus, not that they planned it that way.
The last couple years have found Cisneros continuing solo work in a dub vein for Drag City amid persistent-over-a-span-of-years rumors of a new Om full-length, Pike launching his Pike vs. the Automaton project and currently making a new High on Fire record, and Roeder largely quiet as Neurosis came apart last year, though really what is there to say. Sleep haven’t been completely absent, however, and the specter of another round of touring is never really gone, even five years after The Sciences first splashed down on the listeners who didn’t know they were waiting for it. I don’t think they’ll thud another record like that anytime soon, but it’s kind of comforting not to know that for sure. Universe of infinite possibility, etc.
Seemed like an anniversary worth marking. As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Ah jeez.
Thanks if you’ve kept up with the Quarterly Review thus far. Thanks if you read that thing about Gimme Metal. Thanks in general. As you might guess, it’s been kind of an up and down week.
But I’ve said what I wanted to say about it and the rest is nothing new. Life shit. I’ll spend later today continuing to work on QR stuff for Monday and then later next week review Fuzz Sagrado, Black Moon Circle and Dozer, because I’m stupid and don’t believe in days off.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to drink water. Watch your head. If it’s nice where you are, enjoy the weather. I spent a decent portion of time outside this week for a dude who also spends so much time staring at a laptop screen. You do what you gotta, on all levels.
FRM.
