Everything you want to know about Sleepy Sun is revealed in the band's name. The music is slow and lazy, with a tired—but not bored—quality. It's also bright and buoyant with warm vocals: Singers Bret Constantino and Rachel Williams complement each other on "Sleepy Son," a particularly melodic song that features a harmonica solo. For all the stirring instrumentals—Matt Holliman and Evan Reiss often break from their mellow guitars into heavy riffs—Sleepy Sun is better defined as a jam band than a psych-rock outfit. True, the members sometimes hit a perfect harmony: On songs like "Lord," Constantino drags on the end of his words, slurring his lyrics over hazy music. Other times, it sounds as if every band member is pushing for a solo. Even a beautiful song like "Sleepy Son" attempts to fit together harmonic sounds and over-the-top ones, making it less a singular piece of music than a conceptual musical experiment. This means Sleepy Sun will appeal most to those listeners with plenty of patience: It may take a few spins of the self-released Embrace to really understand that this album is more than just an accidentally recorded band practice.
The likeminded locals in True Widow open.
