Right, so, Sleeping Together. Manchester and Liverpool’s own four-piece purveyors of… what was it again? Oh yeah, energetic indie rock. “The Essentials,” their new single, dropped recently and I think it contains atoms. You know, like everything else. Except maybe thoughts. Are thoughts atoms? My cat doesn’t think so. He thinks thoughts are made of tuna.
Anyway, “The Essentials.” This tune is all about a messy night out, the kind where you wake up with a traffic cone in your bed and a vague sense of having challenged a pigeon to a staring contest. (Spoiler: the pigeon won.) The band, these escape artists of the everyday, dive headfirst into the deliberate act of forgetting. It makes me wonder, what am I deliberately, conveniently forgetting today? Why can’t I remember the end of Hamlet?
It’s a conscious shedding of baggage – “only taking essentials,” they sing, as if preparing for a lunar mission fueled by cheap lager and questionable decisions. And the “let the doors bleed to the next” bit? Pure, unadulterated escapism, painted in the neon hues of a Friday night. I think is very clever. It’s like that feeling when you finally throw away that t-shirt with the mysterious stain you can’t identify or explain. Freedom!
Musically, it’s got that noughties indie bounce, all jangly guitars and driving rhythm, making them a tight knit unit of exhilarating rock. Yet, underneath the surface, a kind of nervous energy crackles. It echoes that feeling of being too present, of hyper-awareness masked as carefree abandon. It’s fascinating. And are those synthesisers or sounds from a kettle?
Did Sleeping Together invent this need to check out, the choice to limit physical and emotion for freedom? Of course not. But they’ve bottled the feeling, shaken it vigorously, and sprayed it all over our eardrums.
The final question to ask I guess is, will “The Essentials” make you dance, contemplating, escaping for a fleeting 3 minutes? Perhaps, if only to find you can’t escape yourself?
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