Sleepwalker, the debut by New Brunswick's Long Beard, is a romantically restless record, but in an inward, idle way. Their reverb-laden dream-pop calls to mind Azure Ray, Yo La Tengo, and Galaxie 500, and it conceals an antsy yearning. "You'd hide out for hours, dreaming of other rooms to lie in," lead singer Leslie Bear sings on "Dream".
When Bear asks questions in her songs, as she often does, her inquiries seem more directed to the silence of her brain than to someone in front of her. "If I ask politely, will you ask me the question of: who do you love?" she sings on "Porch", repeating her question again and again. If there is a drama played out on Sleepwalker, it’s the sort being played out to a mirror, or a diary, or to a love interest’s face imagined in the ceiling above one’s bed.
Sometimes the album meanders, shuffling around noncommittally before finding its footing. "Turkeys", "Dream", and "Morning Ghost" sound nearly made up on the spot, with their minimalist set-up of noodling electric guitars and pitter-patter percussion not quite synchronized. And on "Moths", Bear’s voice is obscured by scratchy, layered guitar and the watery echoes of her own already-breathy vocals.
They sound like a band not trying to find their voice, but to project the one they have with confidence. Bear's voice is a literal manifestation of that hesitance: She’ll draw out words until they’re so high-pitched and thin that they seem to evaporate into the rest of the track mid-song, becoming hard to decipher. "Alone in the dark, is it more alone, than alone in the light," she sings on "Hates the Party", every word spoken firmly as if they exist alone on the page, until "light," heightened in her sing-song and suddenly like another instrument.
Sleepwalker is a very cozy record, full of porch-sitting, moth-watching, sunset-watching. It even ends with a warped rendition of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Bear said in an interview that she ended up writing most of these songs "very late when everyone else was asleep," which is exactly when you should be listening to this album. Sleepwalker doesn’t quite feel polished, or take many risks, but Long Beard is good at making the music that sounds best played in a lit bedroom, late at night, on a suburban street when everyone else is snoozing in their beds.
