Sleep
Cirquit des Yeux
Thalia Hall
December 29th
Sleep / all 📷 : Mark Morrissey
As of writing this article, marijuana is now legal for recreational use in Illinois. There are very few bands that could ring in this occasion quite as fittingly as doom metal legends, Sleep. Without venturing into the bottomless swamp of discussing metal subgenres, from which the only escape is death, Sleep is one of the founders of the modern sludge/stoner/doom metal movement. For the sake of brevity and sanity, we’re folding this all under ‘doom metal.’ Unlike most metal subgenres, doom metal has fairly definable origins. The distinct combination of slower, chunkier riff work, bleak apocalyptic lyrics, and preposterous amounts of weed can (almost) directly be traced to a single album and a single guitarist; Black Sabbath’s 1974 masterpiece, Masters Of Reality, and Tony Iommi, respectively. Throughout the 80s, bands like Witchfinder General and Saint Vitus helped develop this sound until the 90s birthed the weed and science fiction breed of doom metal bands.
Sleep, however, is not a band.
Instead, this is an eldritch monstrosity rising from a marijuana induced twilight of undeath, to smash through the thin boundaries of our reality. While the members of Sleep are prolific in their other endeavors, a Sleep sighting is truly something to behold. To add to the event, an online dispatch announced that these would be the final three shows before Sleep returns beyond the veil (Al Cisneros will be back in March with Om so, like, chill with the corrections).
Before the desolation fell, Pennsylvania born Haley Fohr along with Circuit des Yeux set the tone with an ethereal, soaring, and occasionally thunderous, set. Fohr’s vocals are the centerpiece, but Circuit has an operatic, expansive sound that is simultaneously massive and deeply intimate. Still, it’s impossible to discuss Circuit des Yeux without falling endlessly through the depths of Fohr’s sweeping, epic vocals. Drawing mostly from 2017’s Reaching for Indigo, the multi-instrumentalist is capable of using her gaudy range to draw listeners in with airy singing and powerful personal lyricism before utterly devastating crescendos and a swing towards deep gothic urgency. While each night of this run brought a new opener, Circuit des Yeux managed to destabilize the audience with frightening beauty, perfectly setting the stage for what followed.
Most sound checks are moments to grab a beer or take a leak (or both), but even this standard rock operation crumbles before Sleep. The set was instead preceded by 20 minutes of mission control audio from some unknown space exploration. The beeps and nigh incomprehensible recitation of numerical figures and data points further served to unsettle the audience and frame the eventual blast off. Finally, and with little more fanfare, Matt Pike, Al Cisneros, and Neurosis alum, Jason Roeder, appeared and launched into “Marijauanauts Theme”, which instantly shattered the boundaries of spacetime inside of the Thalia Hall pocket dimension. Drawing from everything but the single-song, hour long epic Dopesmoker, Sleep brought 20 years of titanic power into a cosmic singularity. Beyond simply playing the catalog, they bent and broke their own songs, elongating and melding tracks with such expertise that even the most experienced jam band would be hard pressed to match. This came to a head with a rendition of “Sonic Titan”, off 2018’s gargantuan modern classic, The Sciences, that began near the front of the set and wrapped all the way around an hour, and six songs later. The lugubrious pounding of Al Cisneros on bass, with the hellbound lightning of Matt Pike on guitar, and Roeder crashing on his kit like the endless hurricanes of Jupiter creates the quintessential doom metal sound. Thunderous, yet melodic; destructive, yet enthralling; discordant, but hypnotic. In short, very stoned and very exciting. Night one closed out with Dragonaut, while the band was bathed in blood red light, or the blood of slain interdimensional Anunaki, who can tell at this point?
It’s hard to tell if this indefinite hiatus is the true end of Sleep. There have been others, announced and otherwise. Sleep just tends to appear like their connection with our time continuum is simply different than ours. Jacques Vallee asserted that aliens and ghosts were simply interdimensional beings whose reality existed on top of our own, and any supposed sighting was a moment where the walls between dimensions wore thin. Perhaps, this is merely another phasing out, and they’ll return on their own terms. Perhaps this is really it. Like Roswell or Gulf Breeze or other alien encounters, the Thalia Hall Incident is as fitting a way as any to explain and see off one of heavy metal’s most important groups. At least this one wasn’t a weather balloon.
Al Cisneros will be back March 13 with Om, but Sleep is on hiatus.