Review Summary: double take on my cash flow (emotional)
There’s a lot to Sleep Token, but if we’re being honest, there really isn’t much of anything to Sleep Token. Big release campaigns, bigger masks for anonymity’s (but mostly edginess’) sake, and deeply desperate attempts at co-opting the language of cultism to, uh, foster community, I guess? All of this is cool, and makes sense when you actually listen to the music the band has been cranking out for quite a few years now. Sleep Token love taking disparate genres of music and stuffing them into the same song, without ever attempting to make any part of this song sound… interesting. In fact, 2023’s breakthrough record
Take Me Back to Eden was their magnum opus in that it did just about everything, and impressively managed to sound like nothing.
Fast forward a little under two years, and our boi Vessel has managed to manufacture another hour-long experience for us to behold and worship and gather and stuff. It’s called
Even in Arcadia, and it is Sleep Token’s most focused record yet. Unfortunately, that bar is subterranean. Across its ten tracks, this album makes sure to vibe its way through stadium rock, stadium r&b, stadium trap, stadium saxophone, stadium metalcore, you name it. However, the genre-switching feels ever so slightly more thought out than before: opening cut “Look to Windward” actually
builds and
swells its way to the grand TikTok-black metal moment by way of some toy keyboard samples. Naturally, the song then switches gears to djent-trap-isms, and successfully undermines what could have been the band’s most competent bit of songwriting to date (if you ignore the lyrics, dw, we’ll get to that). “Damocles”, however, actually pulls off building tension towards a big finale without subsequently doing literally everything else… and just ends up sounding like a song The Fray never bothered to push past the demo stage because they deemed it too bland(ly similar to Porcupine Tree’s “Lazarus”). Oops. Turns out that stripping away gimmickry only works when you’re capable of writing engaging music. Similarly, closing cut “Infinite Baths” is obviously meant to be the large, climactic curtain-closer, yet fails entirely within the context of
Even in Arcadia as the record has been doing nothing but chasing climaxes without getting hard first. Disregard this context, and the song feels every bit as large as it sounds, but every bit as hollow as it’s pretending not to be.
I would argue that this showcases one of Sleep Token’s key issues: their two primary goals are at odds, and the band simply do not have the songwriting chops to address this in a productive or interesting manner. Sure, songs can be immersive and ~experimental~ at once… just not in the hands of these masked creatures. Every aspect of
Even in Arcadia appears to want to demand all your attention; everything is grand, dramatic, le epic. However, this immersion is fully broken once Vessel starts semi-rapping over a royalty free beat when he decides the blastbeat section of Radioactive-ripoff #22 got a little too much for the kids. Now, the good thing about everything pre-
Arcadia is that the band were able to, at the very least, keep up the pretense that they
could be good at the one thing if they actually committed. This is no longer an option. In spite of its hyper-plastic production, this record exposes Sleep Token’s incompetence to an unprecedented degree. “Even in Arcadia” is what I imagine a hookless Adele song would sound like, while “Past Self” structures itself around a Xmas-for-kids-type beat and its sole memorable quality is that it isn’t seven minutes long. In simple terms, Sleep Token do not know how to write an engaging song with or without relying on sudden genre shifts, and
Even in Arcadia makes that fact painfully clear.
The second core issue can be narrowed down to Vessel’s vocals. The man has a good voice, but not a flexible one. This is deeply unfortunate, since Sleep Token’s approach to songwriting (in its most literal sense; the writing of songs) demands an agile singer: the kind of voice that floats atop synths, the kind of voice that dances with breakbeats, the kind of voice that pierces through riffs. Unfortunately, Vessel only manages to sound vaguely comfortable (and subsequently enjoyable) in mid tempo alt-rock soundscapes and the ten-second black metal sections that show up every once in a while. Everything else just sounds really goddamn clumsy, awkward, or artificially manipulated to unsuccessfully avoid such awkwardness. As such, the latter half of “Provider” forms the album’s sole highlight: it’s a bland collection of BMTH-isms, but also the only time where Vessel shakes the uncanny valley-ness as his voice seems to make sense amidst the grungy tones.
To be fair, it doesn’t help that the man doesn’t have any compelling lyrics to sing. Most of
Even in Arcadia deals with Vessel’s struggles with fame. Which is valid. Unfortunately, he addresses such issues with the elegance his voice does not possess either. No metaphor is left unexplained or drenched in faux-self awareness - look no further than “
can I get a mirror side stage / looking sideways at my own visage, getting worse” or “
I know I should be touring / I know these chords are boring”. Don’t get me wrong - getting doxxed sucks major ass, and it’s an interesting topic to work through in compelling music. However, I don’t mean to victim blame here, but uh, maybe stop acting like a literal cult leader if you don’t want to be doxxed again and know your audience primarily consists of unstable teenagers and 30-somethings still using Twitter? Either way, the lyrical surface level observations of nothing much are just laughable and made all the worse by the vocals taking center stage in the mix. The aforementioned semi-highlight “Provider” sure tries to undermine itself in its opening lyrics. “
I wanna be your provider / garner you in silk like a spider / roll a die, you bet, I’m a rider / your outer shell, your secret insider”. Who cares about making sense when rhymezone dot com is doing all the heavy lifting, lol.
In conclusion? Yeah, in conclusion: this album sucks and is probably the band’s best and worst work yet. Sleep Token have conclusively proven themselves to be wholly incompetent songwriters and everything here is almost offensively boring. Goodbye.
