Scott Spillane has a glorious beard. Just spectacular, this thing. The beard conveys wisdom, mystery; it derails interviews, inspires Wikipedia edit wars. Amidst the coterie of oddballs known to the world as Elephant 6, Spillane has always stood out, even to those who might not know his name. It’s hardly just the facial hair: Spillane is the horn player for Neutral Milk Hotel, and really, for all of Elephant 6, lending his time-distending, stately-yet-sloppy touch and fondness for atypical instrumentation—euphonium, flugelhorn, that sort of thing—to any E6 record that would have him. Like Jeff Mangum’s heart-stopping bleat or Julian Koster’s swooning saw, it’s impossible to imagine the sound of Elephant 6 without him.
But this truncated version of the Spillane story—horn guy, has beard, knows Jeff—leaves out one crucial bullet point: Spillane not only played with some of the best of Elephant 6, for a brief time, he helmed one of the collective’s finest bands. Spillane came up in Ruston, Louisiana, alongside Mangum, Apples in Stereo pixie-stickler Robert Schneider, and merry Olivia Tremor Control prankster Will Cullen Hart. And right at the peak of E6’s powers, Spillane, his NMH compatriot Jeremy Barnes, late guitarist Will Westbrook, and fellow E6 mainstay John D’Azzo released Are You Sleepy?, the first of two LPs as the Gerbils. Where 2001’s The Battle of Electricity is pleasantly anodyne, 1998’s Are You Sleepy? is anything but: It’s a roughed-up, fuzzed-out, in-the-red power-pop album with proggy ambitions and some deep-fried weirdness just beneath the surface. While not a full-bore classic, it stands among the best of the second-tier E6 offerings, a longtime fan favorite recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in 20 years.
The first thing anybody notices about Are You Sleepy? is Spillane’s voice—he may look like a backwoods dope farmer, but he sings like a cartoon bumblebee. Warm and warbly in the Daniel Johnston mold, his falsetto cuts straight through all the gnarled lo-fi static around him. While most Elephant 6 records attempted to transcend their home-taped origins, Are You Sleepy? is a lo-fi record in every sense, every level screaming hot, every seam undisguised.
Compared with the world-building wonder of classics like Aeroplane, Sleepy? can feel a little one-note: catchy but a tad on the sweet side. Listen closer, and you’ll hear Spillane’s not afraid to mix in a little sour: “Sunshine Soul” likens a budding romance to a cup full of spiders, and “Crayon Box” turns a missed ride to a nearby Portastatic gig into a full-on existential crisis. There’s a semi-surreal, Southern gothic vibe to many lyrics, and much of Are You Sleepy? is written on the body: a lot of knees and lips, teeth and tongues. Quite a few songs trace a kind of fly-on-the-wall longing: the feeling of going unnoticed, of fraying connections with your small circle, of departures both temporary and permanent.
Smack in the middle of Sleepy is “Wet Host,” a five-and-a-half-minute ambient noise collage that separates the record into two distinct halves.The second takes a midnight-dark turn on “Walnuts,” where Spillane recalls a sudden reemergence of “childhood dreams and violent screams” as his syrupy voice overruns with bile. You’d be hard pressed to call Sleepy? an angry record, but it’s got more than a few moments like these, where Spillane’s good-natured facade betrays a kind of uncontrolled bitterness.
Sleepy is best when it lets these stranger impulses seep into the songs, and at its worst when self-indulgence starts to crowd out the songs themselves. The choppy “Ted Doesn’t Mind” devolves into a horny street preacher/”Convoy” routine that’s funny approximately once, and as intermissions go, “Wet Host” would be just as effective at half its length. But these flickers of excess are short-lived. Twenty years on, Are You Sleepy? still feels like the razor blade in the apple.
