Sleeping People — Growing

Three guys and a girl from San Diego make up the band Sleeping People. Their second albums comes in a nice looking digipak with cute drawings and nice paper for the booklet.

Luckily their music is as interesting as the packaging, as their proggy 'Rock In Opposition' is more than excellent. The Fripp/Frith-y character of repetitive and shifting guitarpatterns is played with a more modern rock-attitude and enough energy to stand on its own. A nice organic sound in which drums sound like drums and guitars like guitars, in short: the band sounds very much like a band. Without sounding like a rehearsal or liverecording, it's obviously with enough effort done, crystal clear and with a nice edge. Even though there's no traditional songstructure in the instrumental tunes (except for one vocal piece at the end) the arrangements are very well done. Naturally all the various riffs all connected to each other, never to sound contrived or far-fetched, particularly the driving and inventive drums play a strong part in that. A small electronic sidestep is taken in …Out Dream, it's followed up by the album's punchy highlight Three Things. It's Heart Loves Open takes a darker and more atmospheric turn. The appearance of vocals in the last track People Staying Awake comes as a surprise too, but by then you'd be more than convinced by the quality of their instrumental work.

The band isn't on contemporary prog/zeuhl/RIO specialised imprints Cuneiform or ReR Megacorp, but could fit well in either roster. I encourgage people with a soft spot for 'progressive' rock rooted in aforementioned old genres to check Growing out.