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.

Woodstock Sessions is out now digitally via iTunes.