As a recent promotional tour video pointed out, Sleeper's title can be seen as a comment on Ty Segall's own prolificacy. But it also has a deeper resonance. Last December, the singer and guitarist's adopted father died after a long battle with cancer, and shortly after, Segall stopped speaking to his mother. (He doesn't go into detail in interviews, saying only "she did some bad stuff.") Speaking to NPR, he called this period of his life a "weird, intense time," and Sleeper is a document of what came out of him in that moment. "It was kind of a purge, to be honest," he said.
Gone is the brazen, screaming Segall behind Slaughterhouse, Melted, and Twins. Even the relatively sedate Goodbye Bread, with its exploding heads and angry California commercials, featured a more intense Segall than the one who made Sleeper. "When I was making [Sleeper], I couldn't have written a loud, heavy song if somebody had paid me to," he said. Instead, he picked up his acoustic guitar and made something that owes less to Sabbath and more to Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan or early Bert Jansch. The title track opens quietly with a whistle, and slowly, he strums a minor chord progression louder and louder. "Oh sleeper/ My dreamer/ I dream a dream for you," he sings. It's a gentle track that Segall said was initially written for his slumbering girlfriend, but Sleeper's much weightier symbolic connotations of sleeping and dreaming hang heavy over the album.
While the album's tone and pacing seem to reflect its initial inspiration, the lyrics are rarely confessional in the most explicit sense-- any references to Segall's personal life are cloaked in more broadly relatable terms. Occasionally specific details pop out ("He packed his bags this morning/ He bought his ticket today/ Don't you go away/ Not today," he sings on "She Don't Care"), and he gets slightly more blunt with "Crazy", which is sung to a "little one," offering comfort because "He's here/ He's still here/ Though she is crazy." Segall said that "Crazy" was written spontaneously the moment he recorded it-- something he's never done before-- about his mother. "It’s kind of that thing where a person crosses a line and you just snap," he said. "You hit a point where you don’t care how it affects that person because you just have to say it so you can move on." The way he talks about the song, it's easy to imagine a diatribe, but it's a catchy, sweet, two-and-a-half minute song with a lyrical twist. For all its personal significance, "Crazy" is as open-ended as Segall's best songs.
So after all his shrieking, shredding, and psychedelic freakouts last year, Sleeper offers a welcome sonic respite. It's easily his most stripped down effort to date, full of elegantly simple, catchy, well-crafted songs. And although everything's acoustic, aside from one well-placed electric solo near the end of "The Man Man", the album's packed with subtle diversity. While "6th Street" recalls the more psychedelic-leaning folk he made with Tim Presley on Hair, "The West" could've been plucked from the rambling Carter Family songbook. Then there's "Queen Lullabye", with its distant-sounding falsetto, sludgy guitar, droning low-end, and trudging-through-molasses pace.
But even when he's switching things up on Sleeper, the album never feels as scatterbrained as his previous work. Goodbye Bread opened with a sing-songy ballad and went straight into a shout. Twins featured psychedelia and garage pop. Melted had acoustic-driven catchiness and blown-out fuzz. Those albums could pull off a scattershot of styles with well-placed transitions, but Sleeper is something else. Everything here easily lives in the same universe-- 10 tracks of similarly hued songs, all of a piece. It's his most focused album, with every song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best.
