Sleep
Hemispheres
THIRD MAN
When stoner-metal titans Sleep announced that they were touching back down from the depths of smoke-space to release their fifth studio album, the news was accompanied by the announcement that guitarist Matt Pike wouldn’t be joining them on this return. It caused minor consternation among fans—a common phrase making the rounds online was “No Pike, no party.” And it’s easy to see why fans were concerned: Pike always felt like the flesh and body of Sleep, with bassist/vocalist and founder Al Cisneros being its head and ether. Pike’s riffs are meaty and direct, Cisneros’ bass lines incantatory and ephemeral. How would Sleep function when one was severed from the other?
Pretty damn well, it turns out. For one thing, Cisneros has hired two top-tier stoner-nauts to accompany him on Hemispheres, the band’s first new full-length since 2018’s The Sciences. Providing guitars is the underrated Bubba Dupree, most notably a member of early metallic hardcore act Void. And on drums, he’s secured the services of Melvins’ Dale Crover, one of the undisputed greats of the stoner-metal canon. With their first collaboration, this oddball cult-metal supergroup have come up with something of a banger, albeit an indisputably Cisneros-leaning banger. His vocals are prominently placed in the mix, and there’s plenty of woozy, fluid rhythms that often recall his work in Om.
It’s also, simply, not that heavy. That’s not strictly a bad thing, although some Sleep purists who want to be pummelled into the sand Dopesmoker-style may feel a bit short-changed. For everyone else, these five tracks offer myriad psychedelic delights. There’s the lengthy, gripping solo that takes up the title track’s final act and the trippy, Middle Eastern–inspired outro to “The Morrisist”; there are the polyrhythms that drive much of the fabulously titled closer “Whole Wheat Mountain / Well Baked” and the cosmic-minded nonsense lyrics Sleep introduced on The Sciences—amusing stoner sci-fi references like “dagobud,” “hashteroids,” and “Iommicist.” The title track comes up with a peaceful variation on this theme: images of a world reclaimed by the natural order, where “plants retake the earth / botanical world’s rebirth.”
A delight from start to finish, Hemispheres utilizes its eccentric trio’s skills (Crover’s beats are particularly notable) to commanding, confident, and joyous effect. It’s Cisnernos’ vision that ultimately prevails, but one that’s co-piloted by two extremely adept astronauts who’ve once again returned to Earth with a range of gifts for us to heartily toke upon.
