Album review: Sleep Token – Take Me Back to Eden

By BRIAN GIFFIN

LIKE GHOST, Sleep Token have somehow become one of the most over-hyped bands on the planet right now. Like them, too, this is a band that shrouds itself in mystery and myth, revealing nothing about their true selves, never seen without masks and hoods, doing no press. Both are acts employing a level of pretentiousness that alludes to high art while really just pinching and pilfering from everything around them, blending and defying generic classification.

For those more established readers of HM for whom this anonymous British band are a new discovery, Sleep Token profess themselves to be members of a cult that worships the ancient deity Sleep, their vocalist being its Vessel (the name he goes by), making their songs supplications of some quasi-religious portent, I guess? I did say they were pretentious, and they definitely have some smart marketing behind them.

Invariably described somewhat vaguely as some kind of metal band, to call this album “metal” is to have seemingly no understanding of what that means. Songs like “DYWTYLM”, “Granite” and “Aqua Regia” just sound like Imagine Dragons, mired in dense Auto-tuned pop melodies, tinkling keys, deep synths, clearly enunciated vocals and synchronised drumming and hand claps. At least the tempos are different, something which can’t be said about Imagine Dragons.

Occasionally a darker, heavier track – or part of a track – raises its head, bringing down some djent riffing and growling before the dreamy pop and lilting vocals resurface. Opener “Chokehold” runs its poppy vocal line over a distorted guitar drone that erupts into a thunderous djent rumble for a few seconds to make you think you’re about to hear a much heavier album, a ploy that the very next track “The Summoning” also employs. But then the back-to-back straight-up radio pop tracks “Granite” and “Aqua Regia” and the stipped-back vocal heavy “Ascensionism” – that relies almost entirely on vocal effects and Autotune – are interrupted only by “Vore”, probably the stand out moment of heaviness on the entire album. After a series of middling, softer songs, the title track breaks out some brooding heavier passages but it quickly becomes a piano-driven ballad – “Euclid” does pretty much the same thing.

While experimentation is important and, indeed, essential for a band as pretentious as Sleep Token, Take Me Back to Eden keeps falling back on similar ideas, existing as some kind of ambiguity between what they believe modern metal sounds like and what they know modern “rock” – at least as that term applies to the likes of Imagine Dragons and Bastille, for example – to be like and coming up with a hodgepodge that ends up, somewhat ironically, as being rather faceless.