Sleep

Hey, do you like pot? Well, if you're into the shit I post on this blog, chances are you're into some kind of mind-altering substance(s), so I bet you'll LOVE this album.

Sleep fermented out of San Jose back in the early '90s, on the fringes of that petri dish known as The Pacific Northwest (or, "The Seattle Scene", for my fellow GenX-ers). This trio payed obvious respects to the church of Sabbath, as the repetitive riffs, wandering bass, and OCD drum fills are right off Sabbath's debut album, back when Sabbath were in the end-stages of metamorphosis from blues-rock band to metal visionaries. The short "Some Grass" is a fitting tribute to the ethnic/historical bits of musical tourism that Tony Iommi scattered throughout Black Sabbath's discography. However, a few other influences are evident, as well.

Most obvious is the down-tuned, resin-caked rock of Kyuss, and the subject matter influence of countless mid-70's prog-rock bands. The lyrics are quite interesting on this album, I think, as bands like this are generally the victims of adolescent, sword-&-sorcery overkill. However, Sleep's lyrics are tantalizingly minimalist, just giving you a few shouted, nearly-incoherent lines of a story and letting the guitar riffs & subsequent hard rock jams direct your chemically-enhanced imagination from there. "The Druid" in particular holds more imagery in its four lines than Judas Priest's entire discography.

Leaving behind the human race:
http://rapidshare.com/files/4987695/SHM.zip.html