Concert Review: Sleep at the Riviera Theatre, Chicago

SLEEP
Riviera Theatre, Chicago
Aug. 1, 2018
Roughly 24 hours prior to, and seven miles north of, a sort of anti-Lolla pre-party occurred at the Riviera Theatre. Not that Sleep is officially opposed to outdoor festivals, it's just that you can be assured that the 25-year veterans of (take your pick) sludge/doom/stoner metal would never be a part of Grant Park's Lollapalooza. Wrong crowd, different worlds.

Matt Pike

Coincidental scheduling aside, Sleep is touring to support its album "The Sciences," the band's first full-length release in 20 years. During a 90-minute, eight-song set, the three-piece of guitarist Matt Pike, bassist-singer Al Cisneros and drummer Jason Roeder, played four of these new songs.
After 15 minutes of pre-concert recordings of NASA astronaut chatter over the PA, the band punctuated its spaceman motif with opener "Marijuanaut's Theme," a bombastic power-chord trip through space that layers crashing cymbals, thudding base and fuzzed-out guitar reverberations built around elemental blues riffs. 

Pike's deliberate down-strokes accentuated the slow grooves on "Sonic Titan" and other songs, but at times the momentum ground to a halt, especially at the end of 10-minute "The Clarity": Cisneros's sludgy bass solo, although captivating in its crunchy sound, left the near-capacity crowd stunned into submission. These lulls in energy perhaps are inevitable when song compositions reach a certain length: Sleep builds such momentum with repetitious and mesmerizing riffage and drum rhythms that oftentimes song endings harshed the crowd's buzz. The band of course needed a breather between each marathon.

Al Cisneros

Instrumentals are the band's forte (Cisneros's vocals were mixed a tad low), and "The Botanist" allowed ever-shirtless Pike space to forgo chords for extended solos in a nearly anachronistic display of guitar god prowess.
"Giza Butler," off the new album, closed the concert with its tale of the CBDeacon performing his cannabis sacraments, references not lost in the crowd above which, swirling in the green and purple lights, hung a smoky haze since the first notes of  "Marijuanaut's Theme" rung out.



CONCERT SET LIST
Marijuanaut's Theme
Holy Mountain
The Clarity
Sonic Titan
Leagues Beneath
The Botanist
Dragonaut
Encore: Giza Butler 

Link to review of the album "The Sciences"