sleeping songs by the sleeping bag
"there is a sense of adventure in every release by the sleeping bag that is always a breath of fresh air. what started as lo-fi bedroom pop akin to sebadoh has evolved into something wholly unique, shifting from album to album wildly across genres. multi-instrumentalist douglas campbell pours his heart and soul into Sleeping Songs, the most recent in the sleeping bag canon, and that sincerity and earnestness are immediately apparent. the production is stark and situates tape hiss and the soft, chaotic hum front and center, not as a bug but a feature. campbell’s music is urgent and demands attention, whether it’s slickly-produced or cobbled together from the detritus afforded to the young and, often, poor. it’s within those limitations that campbell excels, both because of his acumen as a composer and as a producer who has to tell his story. campbell has captured, at a young age, what so many fail to learn until much too late, that creativity is the journey. from a compositional standpoint, campbell is a beast. the visceral gut-punch of “will you still love me?” screamed in a near cry doen’t sound “emo” (by conventional standards), and it makes way for the glitch-heavy throb of the track “sleepwalk around.” campbell channels bands as disparate as ween and ministry into something that is entirely fresh and unconventionally beautiful. his voice is sampled and chopped and there is a shoegaze-like quality to the dense layers of guitar, feedback and effected vocals that make for an incredible listen. it only gets better from there, with the desperate loneliness of “speed of light (should’ve)” on into the counterintuitive fierceness of “lullaby.” sleeping songs is an anthem for everyone who has ever had to create to exorcise their pain, and it’s fucking beautiful."
Syd Bishop
LEO Weekly
Tracklist
| 1. | prologue (sleeping songs) | 1:16 |
| 2. | will you still love me? | 3:58 |
| 3. | sleepwalk around | 4:16 |
| 4. | dancing shoes | 5:01 |
| 5. | favorite moments (not unloved) | 3:06 |
| 6. | quiet little death of everything | 5:36 |
| 7. | iceskating endeavors | 3:00 |
| 8. | speed of light (should've) | 5:32 |
| 9. | tired of being so tired | 4:29 |
| 10. | how will i know you're there? | 4:52 |
| 11. | passing cars | 3:56 |
| 12. | drinking and driving in nyc | 10:25 |
| 13. | lullaby | 8:00 |
| 14. | epilogue (the sleeping bag) | 3:26 |
Credits
doug campbell - guitars (electric, acoustic, and broken), bass, drums/drum machines, synthesizers, lap steel, saxophone, cello, organ, tape manipulations.
guest contributions:
z meredith - backing vocals and additional guitar (track 8), co-engineering (tracks 10, 12)
e tracy - sound fx (track 12), spectrogram imaging (track 14, cassette version only).
