Album Review: Long Beard - Sleepwalker

There are some albums that just lend themselves well to specific seasons.

Sometimes, it’s the music—the music itself conjures or evokes a specific feeling from a time of year; sometimes, it’s when you discovered the album—if a friend handed you a copy of something in the late fall, it’s the kind of album that you associate with that time of year, thus becoming “a fall record.”

Sometimes it’s both of those, and the debut full length from Long Beard, Sleepwalker, is both of those things.

I’ll admit that I was drawn to this album, at first, by the band’s name (for obvious reasons.) Long Beard is a band comprised, primarily of Leslie Bear. She does not have a beard, despite the band’s moniker.

The good news is that Long Beard is so much more than an attractive name. It’s darn near perfect autumn music—thanks to its late October release date, but also the atmosphere that is created throughout the running time of Sleepwalker.

There’s a strange familiarity from the very opening notes of the album’s second track, “Porch.” It’s an inviting, somber, and fragile familiarity that even after multiple listens, I can’t quite put my finger on. There are traces of somber chanteuse Anna-Lynne Williams in Bear’s delicate, plaintive vocals; there are traces of Sea Oleena, and the sweeping grandeur created on last year’s marvelous Shallow; and most welcoming, traces of Elizabeth Powell and Land of Talk because of the guitar driving nature of Sleepwalker.

Despite wearing these comparisons that I am drawing, it is a wholly unique listen—drawing inspiration from both jangle and dream pop to draw you in with a very straightforward first half before revealing its hazy, swooning experimental side, which occurs throughout three loosely connect tracks in the album’s latter half.

Even with such a shift, Sleepwalker is still an incredibly enjoyable and evocative album, specifically in the album’s first half, with the songs “Porch, “Hates The Party,” and “Turkeys” being the finest moments—showcasing Beard’s slightly haunted pleading, backed by minimal, gorgeous “indie rock” instrumentation.

Taken as a whole, Sleepwalker is one of those impressive debut albums that only comes along once in awhile and shows an incredible amount of promise for such a young outfit, impressively packing the sound of a season into 11 tracks.

Sleepwalker is out now via Team Love