The Sleeping, Believe What We Tell You

I hate to damn with faint praise, but after repeated listens to the reissue of The Sleeping’s 2004 album Believe What We Tell You, I’m afraid I have to — I’ve got to confess that while the album’s okay, I’m not sure it really merited reissuing.

I mean, yeah, it’s great that the band’s done well since (and I hear the followup, last year’s Questions and Answers, is better), but I think this is best viewed as a prequel to the band’s later successes, with all the caveats that entails. There’s a lot of promise here, certainly; it’s just that this really feels like the Long Island band was still taking its first fumbling steps towards what they wanted to eventually do.

There’s the overall conceit of the album, for one thing — Believe What We Tell You has little “broadcast” interludes/sounds scattered throughout, including an utterly pointless outro of sorts at the end with “tune out.” The Sleeping were apparently going for some kind of deep message about media brainwashing, which is commendable, but not really news, if you know what I mean.

Then there’s the stumbling, disjointed-ness of some of the tracks, notably “The Big Breakdown,” Days 1 and 2, opener “Sunday Matinee (Reel To Real),” and “One Flight One Flame” (the latter two show up here both as a bonus demo tracks and in their final form, by the way, along with non-album track “Until The Night”). The music runs along the same lines as fellow post-emo rockers like Taking Back Sunday and Spitalfield, merging elements of alt-rock, hardcore, prog, and sweetly melodic rock into, ah, pretty much a big mess.

Which is the band’s main problem, really; there are ways to mash up all these styles and make it sound tight and unified (see A Wilhelm Scream or Taking Back Sunday), but with Believe What We Tell You it seems pretty evident that The Sleeping hadn’t yet hit upon ’em. Songs shift styles jarringly and with not much apparent reason beyond the fact that the band members themselves can switch styles at will. Doing that kind of thing is well and good, and these songs aren’t really bad, per se, but simply bouncing between hardcore, screamo, and prog-rock all within the space of a minute doesn’t necessarily make a song good.

As I hinted at above, there are some moments of promise on Believe What We Tell You, primarily on the album’s title track, which is a lot more focused and less overreaching than most of its cohorts; it’s got a nice, big, hooky chorus that I can’t get out of my head, as well as the most direct assertion of the album’s premise. There’s also “If Your Heart Was Broken… You Would Be Dead,” which lunges towards disaster with a bed of annoying “party scene” noise/voices but miraculously rescues things by inexorably stacking one layer of sound on top of another and then incorporating angry, shout-sung female vocals that make their way up from beneath the sound. It reminds me of a pre-classic rock fetish Anniversary, and that’s a definite point in The Sleeping’s favor. Oh, and I like the production trick at the end where it sounds like the tape is speeding up to infinity.

Beyond that, “Broadcast Silence” does well with a subtler, simpler tack than most of the other tracks here, and “15 on the Freeway” uses coolly atmospheric, Sparta-ish guitars floating through the vocals to add some variety to things. Come to think of it, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this album as a whole, so long as you view it, again, as a prequel of sorts. I may not be putting it into heavy rotation on the iPod, but the hints of good things to come have me intrigued enough to want more. And that’s no bad thing.