Artist: Ty Segall
Album: Sleeper
Bitrate: 229kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Drag City
Genre: Rock
Size: 61.72 megs
PlayTime: 0h 35min 54sec total
Rip Date: 2013-08-24
Store Date: 2013-08-23

Track List:

01. Sleeper                          3:55
02. The Keepers                      3:42
03. Crazy                            2:28
04. The Man Man                      3:17
05. She Don't Care                   3:50
06. Come Outside                     4:34
07. 6th Street                       2:55
08. Sweet C.C.                       3:36
09. Queen Lullaby                    4:21
10. The West                         3:16

Release Notes:

As a recent promotional tour video pointed out, Sleeper's title can be seen as a
comment on Ty Segall's own prolificacy. But it also has a deeper resonance. Last
December, the singer and guitarist's adopted father died after a long battle
with cancer, and shortly after, Segall stopped speaking to his mother. (He
doesn't go into detail in interviews, saying only "she did some bad stuff.")
Speaking to NPR, he called this period of his life a "weird, intense time," and
Sleeper is a document of what came out of him in that moment. "It was kind of a
purge, to be honest," he said.

Gone is the brazen, screaming Segall behind Slaughterhouse, Melted, and Twins.
Even the relatively sedate Goodbye Bread, with its exploding heads and angry
California commercials, featured a more intense Segall than the one who made
Sleeper. "When I was making [Sleeper], I couldn't have written a loud, heavy
song if somebody had paid me to," he said. Instead, he picked up his acoustic
guitar and made something that owes less to Sabbath and more to Tyrannosaurus
Rex-era Marc Bolan or early Bert Jansch. The title track opens quietly with a
whistle, and slowly, he strums a minor chord progression louder and louder. "Oh
sleeper/ My dreamer/ I dream a dream for you," he sings. It's a gentle track
that Segall said was initially written for his slumbering girlfriend, but
Sleeper's much weightier symbolic connotations of sleeping and dreaming hang
heavy over the album.

While the album's tone and pacing seem to reflect its initial inspiration, the
lyrics are rarely confessional in the most explicit sense-- any references to
Segall's personal life are cloaked in more broadly relatable terms. Occasionally
specific details pop out ("He packed his bags this morning/ He bought his ticket
today/ Don't you go away/ Not today," he sings on "She Don't Care"), and he gets
slightly more blunt with "Crazy", which is sung to a "little one," offering
comfort because "He's here/ He's still here/ Though she is crazy." Segall said
that "Crazy" was written spontaneously the moment he recorded it-- something
he's never done before-- about his mother. "It’s kind of that thing where a
person crosses a line and you just snap," he said. "You hit a point where you
don’t care how it affects that person because you just have to say it so you can
move on." The way he talks about the song, it's easy to imagine a diatribe, but
it's a catchy, sweet, two-and-a-half minute song with a lyrical twist. For all
its personal significance, "Crazy" is as open-ended as Segall's best songs.

So after all his shrieking, shredding, and psychedelic freakouts last year,
Sleeper offers a welcome sonic respite. It's easily his most stripped down
effort to date, full of elegantly simple, catchy, well-crafted songs. And
although everything's acoustic, aside from one well-placed electric solo near
the end of "The Man Man", the album's packed with subtle diversity. While "6th
Street" recalls the more psychedelic-leaning folk he made with Tim Presley on
Hair, "The West" could've been plucked from the rambling Carter Family songbook.
Then there's "Queen Lullabye", with its distant-sounding falsetto, sludgy
guitar, droning low-end, and trudging-through-molasses pace.

But even when he's switching things up on Sleeper, the album never feels as
scatterbrained as his previous work. Goodbye Bread opened with a sing-songy
ballad and went straight into a shout. Twins featured psychedelia and garage
pop. Melted had acoustic-driven catchiness and blown-out fuzz. Those albums
could pull off a scattershot of styles with well-placed transitions, but Sleeper
is something else. Everything here easily lives in the same universe-- 10 tracks
of similarly hued songs, all of a piece. It's his most focused album, with every
song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best.