The Sleeping – Believe What We Tell You
Victory Records (reissued 2/6/07; originally released 2004)
Alternative/Post-hardcore
In an effort to sound more like a reputable rock critic, I have selected seven words from a Sparknotes English Vocabulary Study Cards collection I bought when I was fooling myself into thinking that I was going to take the GRE’s. I will attempt, like a sad magician performing sad card tricks for sad retirees on a sad cruise line, to incorporate these words into my review subtly and without notice, mixing with my own expansive vocabulary and the synonyms Microsoft Word suggests.
The Sleeping is a Long Island foursome inundating us with their scurrilous lyrics and odious themes. One might propose that their acumen lyrics towards anger and wizened love is some sort of collusion between the band and teenage depression.
This album, an apparent re-release by Victory Records, of their first album from 2004 is a futile dive into self-importance. One track called “If Your Heart Was Broken… You Would Be Deadâ€, is an abhor-able 6 minutes of crowd muttering with a boring guitar dance in the background. Remember that scene in This Is Spinal Tap when, at the last second, the band decided to try and play jazz-fusion? It is a lot like that. In a two-part song about a car breaking down in a small town—juxtaposed with the breaking down of a relationship—the band does a great job of capturing just how boring it is to be stuck in a small town.
The actual music is well played by Sal, Joe and Cam and drifts between the emo, angsty whine and a more power-driven emotional hardcore sound in tracks like “Believe What We Tell You” and “Fleet”. Do I hear a bit of Pantera slipping into these songs? They seem much more comfortable in the skin of a hardcore band. The thing about these pseudo-punk, pseudo-hardcore bands is the songwriting; they are trapped in this self-loathing of ex-girlfriends, beer and how no one understands them. Oh and how hard it is to be on the road, even though they have only been doing it for a few years. I am sure it is hard, but no one wants to hear a song about how much I hate humping boxes at a law firm all day. They are talented musicians that refuse to humble themselves to actually dig deeper into the human state and shine the light into the truly dark places of the soul.
This album has a lot of problems that a band in its beginning will always have and needs to work out. There is talent there but what does anyone have to gain by re-releasing this album? This isn’t Kurt Cobain’s garage tapes… it is a sloppy mix of a band who wants to be hardcore but are being pushing into the shoes of bands that sell more records, like Fall Out Boy and Taking Back Sunday. What these boys need—and I don’t know if they found it for their 2006 album Questions and Answers—is a personality.
Rating:
WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT…
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Murder Ballads (1996)
If you want to dive into the more horrible aspects of human existence, listen to this album. In every song, at least one person is murdered, more often than not in a very gruesome way. Be it the killing spree of “Stagger Lee”, the beating death of a young woman in “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, or the teenage girl Lottie who enjoys killing all of God’s creatures. This is honestly a disturbing album that will keep you up late into the night.
Nick Cave has the car accident talent where we cannot look away from the horror that is put before us. He finds the darkness in love and the happiness in death. Screaming into a microphone does not a dark song make; often times it is the fact that a singer can remain calm while talking about the pain that makes the song so disturbing.
“Fucking Hostile” by Pantera, from the album Vulgar Display of Power (1992)
Then again, sometimes you just have to scream.
