Album Review: Team Sleep - The Woodstock Sessions
In fitting with the band’s disorganized, loose history, it is only fitting that the release of Team Sleep’s first effort in over a decade could be described as botched and terribly confusing.
It’s also fitting that their first release in over a decade
be a live album, which repurposes five of the songs from their only official
studio album, 2005’s self titled release, which, in turn, repurposed material
that had been recorded in the early 2000s and subsequently leaked online,
causing the album to be scrapped and delayed countless times.
Word of the project Team Sleep surfaced shortly after the
release of the Deftones’ magnificent 2000 release, The White Pony. The group, comprised of Deftones frontman Chino
Moreno, as well as guitarist Todd Wilkinson and DJ Crook, was described early
on as Moreno’s “trip hop side project.”
The trio began working on an album together, but the
completed tracks surfaced online in the early days of file sharing (2002-03) and
the project was put on hold indefinitely while Moreno focused back on his day
job with the maligned self titled Deftones record released in May 2003.
When Team Sleep’s debut LP finally surfaced in the spring of
2005, the band had been rounded out to include Pinback singer Rob Crow, as well
as drummer for hire Zach Hill, formerly of Hella (and now of Death Grips.) A
bulk of the originally leaked album re-appeared in a slightly altered format,
as well as new material with Crow on lead vocals.
The album itself came off as less of “Moreno’s trip hop side
project,” and more like a handful of ideas and genres that kind of fit
together, kind of sounded different,
but also came off like “Deftones Lite,” in some cases.
In the last decade, Team Sleep remained dormant while Moreno
released three more albums with the Deftones, and started two additional
projects—the electronic based, “witch house” group Crosses, and the dreamy
post-rock outfit Palms.
Team Sleep remerged last fall with the word that they were
going to be recording a live album in Woodstock, NY and invited fans to partake
in the intimate sessions. The resulting performance arrives now in the form of Woodstock Sessions Vol. 4, a confusing
title for those Team Sleep fans who feel that there are three other live albums
sitting around somewhere that they missed some how, or that are waiting in the
wings to be released.
What is more confusing, and exponentially more frustrating,
is the ambiguous and possibly misleading way Woodstock was released, via a Pledge Music campaign.
“Your participation will be essential to the independent
creation and release of the live performance and our forthcoming studio
record,” the band’s statement on the Pledge Music site said.
I guess I’m not the only one who thought that when you
pledged, you were getting a copy of the live album in return. But on Friday,
when their Pledge Music site project closed, and Woodstock Sessions showed up online in iTunes and on Amazon, and
not in an email from the band saying it was available to download as part of
the $10 I threw them, I was confused.
And I was not the only one. The “conversation” board on the
Team Sleep Pledge Music page is full of people who were also confused by the
band’s statement, and lack of clarification thus far, with only one Team Sleep
super fan coming to their rescue to try to calm people down, explaining that
the “new” album is, in fact” a new album that is arriving at some point in the
indefinite future.
But why did everyone think they were getting a copy of the
live album in exchange for pledging money to their campaign?
So right now, I’m out around $19 or so—the $10 I coughed up
for an album that will hopefully, at some point, see the light of day, and then
the $8 or $9 for the Woodstock Sessions
that I downloaded once I realized what was going on with this.
But this isn’t really supposed to be a place for me to
complain about my first world problems, and my confusion and frustration with
how a crowd funded campaign was mishandled. This is supposed to be a review of
what I am currently listening to on my headphones—The Woodstock Sessions by Team Sleep.
Comprised of nine songs tracks total, two of them are “new”
songs, or at least songs that never made it onto either iteration of the band’s
debut—the proper 2005 release, or the much preferred leaked material from three
years before. “O.P.” and “Formant” channel the early days of the band—when they
weren’t focused on beats, they were focused on making de-tuned, aggressive
sounding post rock. Also, when Chino didn’t sing on every song—either because
the songs were meant to be instrumental, or on the leaked tracks, he hadn’t
completed vocals. But both “new” songs on The
Woodstock Sessions are instrumental pieces, possibly still in their
earliest form.
Of the “older” tracks that present themselves here, they all
benefit from the added punch of playing them live, together, as a band—the
chorus of “Ever (Foreign Flag)” hits harder than it did on the slightly
reserved version that made the final cut of the self titled release decade ago,
and the same could be set for the aggression on the album’s opening track,
“Your Skull is Red.”
The real standouts on The
Woodstock Sessions are the album’s final three tracks—the visceral take of
oldie “Blvd. Nights,” and the double shot of “Death by Plane” and “Live From
The Stage” all show why ten years removed from their debut, and 13 years
removed from its earliest days, Team Sleep still matters in 2015.
In its original form, “Blvd. Nights” was one of many
instrumental tracks, and Moreno subsequently added mysterious, ambiguous lyrics
to it for the version included on their self-titled record. Here, in a
ramshackle, unhinged live take, the whole thing sounds on the verge of falling
apart, held together by powerful, frenetic drumming of Gil Sharone and the
desperate screams of Moreno.
“Death by Plane” is, personally, one of my favorite Team
Sleep songs. It’s the “intro” of sorts to the leaked material from the early
2000s, and it’s probably one of the band’s weirdest songs. Warbled and
distended, it is mostly just acoustic guitar strums with Chino mumbling some,
again, ambiguous lyrics over the top of it. Here, in this live version, his
vocals are crystal clear, and in slightly over a minute, he croons over slight
reverb while reserved, somber guitars play in the background, and odd samples
and noises trigger off in the distance.
This track then sets up the album’s magnum opus: an
eight-minute take of “Live From The Stage,” which, at one point, was known as
“Natalie Portman.” In the earliest form of the song, it ended without the heavy
“rock” music coda, which was tagged on in 2005. Here, the band really takes
their time building up to that moment—Moreno, again, with clear vocals as Todd
Wilkinson’s dreamy guitar progression hypnotizes you for nearly five minutes
before the song just explodes into cacophony and distorted drum fills before
ending.
“That’s it,” Moreno says to the crowd in studio with them as
they applaud.
Part of me believes that this is it. Talk of a “new” Team Sleep record started in 2006 with demos
being posted to MySpace, and then a few live shows in 2007. And then nothing.
I guess the band owes me something. I did pledge them $10,
so if there is some kind of “new” release that is in the works, a digital copy
of it is rightfully mine. But I won’t hold my breath. The Woodstock Sessions is a rejuvenation, of sorts—both for the
band, and for the listener. For the band, it obviously got them (somewhat)
focused on the future of a long dormant project; for the listener, it got me interested
in the band again, at least for the time being. I still have that leaked early
material on my laptop, and I still have my copy of their self-titled record. I
don’t listen to it very often, but when I do, I remember my final weeks as a
senior in college, and that first summer after graduating.
For a lot of “rock” bands, they make music that doesn’t grow
with a person. I haven’t taken Team Sleep with me into my 30s, really. And heck,
as hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t taken the Deftones with me either. But there’s
always nostalgia, and The Woodstock
Sessions are just htat—a new, slightly refreshed at something you were fond
of many, many years ago.
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