Sleep Jerusalem
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A teenage quartet when they debuted with Volume One on the indie Tupelo in 1990, Sleep didn’t do many interviews or tour much–their biggest U.S. sojourn to date was opening for Hawkwind in early ’94. Sometime in ’90 or ’91 the original second guitarist, Justin Marler, set off for Alaska to become a monk. And the remaining three members spent much of the middle of the decade trying to get out of their deal with Earache, the metal label for which they’d made their second record, Sleep’s Holy Mountain, in 1992. But bassist and vocalist Al Cisneros, drummer Chris Hakius, and guitarist Matt Pike seem to have used their downtime well, honing their obsessions with outsize riffs (Cisneros has the cover of Black Sabbath’s Volume 4 tattooed across his back), Green amplifiers, and a broadly Christian spirituality (the liner notes written for the London packaging offered “highest thanks to the Father and Son”).
The two albums that precede it only hint at how fruitfully the band’s greatest loves would come together on Jerusalem, which took years to write and originally clocked in at more than 70 minutes. Its lyric sheet, larded with biblical references, describes a caravan crossing the deserts of the Middle East questing for the high priests of weed. “Drop out of life with bong in hand,” Cisneros bellows after a seven-minute introduction, “follow the smoke to the riff-filled land.” Each syllable is sustained long enough to suggest the cathedral-filling drones of some extremely baked midnight mass–one for which Cisneros’s book-rewriting hard-rock bass, Pike’s mind-bending guitar, and Hakius’s insistent psychedelic march beat provide an ideal sound track.
