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Album Details

• Artist: Zelienople
• Album: Sleeper Coach
• Label: Loose Thread
• Year of Release: 2004
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: rbidet on 2004-11-27

What's the difference between a good six-minute bliss-out comprised of narcotized tempos and banks of foggy, lysergic guitars rolling in slowly to envelope your brain and a bad one? I don't know, but like good porn, you'll know it when you see it - or hear it in this case. The second album from Chicago drone-space quartet Zelienople is of the former variety (the good one). Patient and evocative, with an appealingly blurred production that sounds like the product of spontaneous bedroom and spare room sessions (and it was), Sleeper Coach surprises in its atmosphere of subtly implied menace. Slightly sour notes drift through the haze and the drones suggest a persistent agony fighting its way from beneath the morphine. "Curtains" is a forbidding, seemingly improvised piece that holds on to its sylph-like form enough to imply structure, yet it avoids any sense of imposed restraint. "Ship That Goes Down" is reminiscent of the great unsung band Insides in the balance between hypnotic repetition and fetching songform. The inherent pretension in thinking you can entertain or enlighten anyone with an hours' worth of demanding subtlety is best left to those with enough command of the ethereal nature of mood, and Zelienople seem to have it. A spooky, nagging record that'll have you nervously checking your locks and pondering that noise you just heard.

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