Embrace was the perfect title for the debut LP by California rock'n'roll six-piece Sleepy Sun. The verb felt like a mission statement for the Golden State magpies. A pan-psychedelic rock band, Sleepy Sun seemed intent on tying together the electric and acoustic ends of Led Zeppelin's discography and wrangling its favorites-- British folk, stoner metal, and classic rock among them-- together with the lasso. That inclusive approach had its consequences, though, especially with equivocation. Because Sleepy Sun fit so many elements into Embrace, each piece felt a bit unadventurous and overly familiar, though the album as a whole encouraged the unexpected.
Sleepy Sun's second LP exaggerates the problems of its predecessor by pushing nothing too far or too hard. "Sandstorm Woman", the 10-minute closing epic, feels like little more than the middle-aged house band at your neighborhood biker bar coming down from a set-break joint. The pensive moments come as if presaged by telegraph. The big rock outro-- all sweaty frontman glossolalia, guitar spirals, harmonica howls, and stretched drum rolls-- gradually slows its tempo and restrains its roar, resolving into a tidy, diminished coda. Unlike Earthless, Sleep, or any of the dozens of bands who have taken such moments to hell and the moon, Sleepy Sun bring it back to Earth and let it rest. It's the refusal to get too crazy, and it's boring. Many of these nine tracks suffer from the same half-there approach. The acoustic tunes stacked early do little but drift daintily. "Open Eyes" starts as a promising mix of clipped meters and refracted vocals. Ultimately, though, it heads for the same electric rock peaks that Black Mountain conquered on 2008's In the Future (see that band's "Tyrants"). Sleepy Sun fall well short.
Such circumscription isn't Fever's only problem, though it is the most vexing. Thing is, you've probably heard all of this before, via Zeppelin, Mountain, Sabbath, Pentangle, or any of the thousands of bands that have cited those acts as influences. Sleepy Sun's psychedelic rock is of a cut-and-paste variety, where a few decades of platitudes are snipped from their sources and simply rearranged. There's a fat-bottomed drum breakdown attached to a harmonica solo on "Desert God", and a fascination with stop-time and slow-burn maneuvers dominates "Wild Machines". "Marina" gets the mid-song auxiliary percussion and tribal chanting, while "Freedom Line" sports the meditative vocal intro. OK, dudes, we get it-- you like LPs, too.
All that said, Fever is beyond capably played and produced. Bret Constantino and Rachel Fannan offer adaptable voices, as fit for the thunder-on-the-mountain dramatics of "Open Eyes" as they are the across-a-bedroom intimacy of "Ooh Boy". Guitarists Matt Holliman and Even Reiss sound ready for most anything, too, whether it's the meticulous distortion and electric swells throughout "Acid Love" or the lithe, intertwining acoustic guitars during "Rigamaroo". The bass maw and stuttering drums of "Freedom Line" twist and shift, and producer Stewart affords enough sonic presence-and-pop to make it seem as though the band is practicing across the hall. And that's what makes Fever so frustrating. Sleepy Sun have learned the methods and studied the maps, but-- at least on record-- they've yet to take that knowledge into territory that feels new or, really, like it's their own.
