You were warned about The Sleep-ins before, but you didn’t listen.

Well there’s nothing to be dire about, you’ll get another chance to listen. The Aussie rockers are returning with another album in April 2025, preceded by singles later this year.

So, you might be thinking, “these characters have some explaining to do.” And they do. Just listen, and they will.

[originally published on Americana-UK – 8 January 2011]

by John Aird

Kick-out the jams with a beeping keyboard hook and then kick-in the power with a brace of heavy bass lines and churning guitar riffing, mix in half buried half surfaced lyrics about a girl who comes from the sky and a birthday trip to Roswell and you surely have a college radio classic in “Silver State”. You could dance to this at the Indy Disco. Probably. You could certainly bounce around in a pretty aggressive way to “Angelina” , and I fully believe that “Chrome Skull Cap & Matching Codpiece” will have you strutting and sneering as your (late period) Alice Cooper emerges from the recessed shadows of your personality.

And if you’re starting to worry that this album is just moving further into hard rock territory with each progressive song then everything gets wound back in “Running Out Here” which features a breathless indistinct vocal filtered over melodic lead guitar lines. The foot stomping opening chunky guitar chords of “Tonya, Extraplanetary Spaceship Girl” may be just a little close to London Calling, but better that than aping say Franz Ferdinand’s overly artful take on dominant guitar chord progressions. “Desert Song” sees an unexpected break out of gentle, restrained guitar and lightly blended vocals proffering the hippy advice – “Be what you want to/feel what you ought to/…./follow the sky back home…to me/”. And if “Desert Song” is the gentler side of The Sleep-ins then “Astro-not” is a rapid revival of their more typical heavy rock riffage that is over so quickly that you hardly realise it began. So it acts almost as an introduction to the final song “Bugs on my Face” which is a full on return to the catchy loud hook heavy style, drums to the fore, that opened the album out and which improves with every listen as you revel in the walls of deafening sound and the almost silent crevices which appear from time to time in this mighty edifice of rock. But, hey I should say that, “Silver State” aside, it didn’t really grab me at first. Give it a few plays though and the structures become right, the blend is spot on and although it could have been made any time in the last thirty years it’s none the worse for that. MC5, Stooges…that’s the lineage – whatever their press release thinks.