Goff's Pick of the Week- Sleep's Holy Mountain by Sleep

Listening to Sleep is like sitting in a smoke filled room, an all encompassing smoke that buzzes around your head and seeps through door cracks and open windows. And I can only imagine that that is how Sleep’s second album, Sleep’s Holy Mountain was recorded; in a smoke filled room, an all encompassing smoke that buzzes around your head and seeps through door cracks and open windows. What I’m getting at is that Sleep did a lot of drugs, they were one of the pioneers of the genre that would come to be known as stoner metal (or sludge metal if you prefer) and were one of the first bands to combine metal and psychedelica since Black Sabbath twenty years before released the earth shaking Paranoid. I mean for goodness sakes, their third album, which is only one song and is an hour in length is entitled Dopesmoker. But here we are talking about Sleep’s Holy Mountain, and this is an album that grabs you by the jugular from the very opening notes. Those opening notes are taken from the song Dragonaut, which from the best of my understanding, is about a dragon that flies to mars. Regardless of what the song is about, the tracks rambling opening lick is by far one of the best metal openers of all time, with the slow crawl of the tempo the band proves what very few bands before it were able to prove, mostly the aforementioned Black Sabbath and Witchcraft, that metal doesn’t need to be played quickly to be heavy.

                Thematically, the album is mostly about wizards and dragons and such. And while the band may never touch on any topics as critical as Vietnam like Black Sabbath did, they still represent a very marginalized portion of the metal scene, especially for the time. This group consisted of persons who liked metal but didn’t like the speed metal bands of the eighties, i.e. Slayer, Metallica and such. Today a number of bands have tried to appeal to the niche audience, a testament to Sleep’s staying power, bands like Electric Wizard and High on Fire, the latter of which is made up of members of Sleep. Sleep took the normal metal formula, tuned down guitars, growled lyrics and slowed it down to a third of the speed that it normally would be played at, almost making the band sound lazy. This makes a lot of sense though, as the time that Sleep was recording was the early nineties, a period that saw the rise of several “slacker bands” like Pavement and Sebadoh. The time period and the fact that no one had made music like this for twenty years proved to be a perfect storm for Sleep, elevating them to a cult status that I would wager they never expected.