Record Review: Wintersleep - Welcome to the Night Sky

via Ragged Words
Wintersleep – Welcome to the Night
Labwork
Release Date: 02/02/2009
Ragged Rating Rating: *+1.5/5
In a Ragged Word: Glib

Kevin Drew need not lose any sleep over the pop-rock overtures of Wintersleep. In fact, Drew, the Broken Social Scene co-founder, should be seen as the retort to this really rather dull event – Welcome to the Night Sky. The night sky is one made up of glimmering stars and sometimes the red tint of the planet Mars. There is no such brilliance in this, the third album from Wintersleep. What you have instead is a barrel of clichés and samey drum scuttles that go neither anywhere interesting nor dark. Indeed, the darkest that vocalist Paul Murphy gets is on ‘Freaks’, where he says ‘fuck’ a few times and refers to drugs.

At his best, Murphy sounds a bit like Zach Schwartz of Rogue Wave, but commonly Murphy is akin to Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty mega-stardom. Much of the singing is vague cooing, and on ‘Search Party’ the vocals are trailed by the spiralling delay effect that a producer will enforce just to fill a yawning bar. These songs leave much to be desired, artistically, but they will prove popular in the mainstream. Wintersleep deal in a kind of progressive soft-rock that is entirely radio-friendly, and the band know this. These are songs a group will definitely make a living from. Perhaps ‘Weighty Ghost’ is Wintersleep’s clearest grasp of an anthem, with Murphy singing, ‘have you seen my ghost?’ before descending into acceptable nah-nahing..

Perhaps the most galling aspect here, and one that could hinge on whether this record is likable or not, is the idea that Murphy is philosophising over these palm-mute power ballads. If you’re looking for big questions look to Phil Elverum’s latest, but if you’re looking for something altogether damp why not consider ‘Dead Letter & Infinite Yes’, with Murphy talking about ‘death’, and out-pouring to a ‘therapist’. It’s amazing that someone can sound so sincere about being half-hearted. The real drag is that there is no darkness here, but then the record’s title is tuned to just that – the night. This brand of radio-friendly intellect-rock is something not to waste your time with. Just because a guitarist presses his toe to a distortion pedal it doesn’t make the music dangerous. But if you’re into bland, faux-grandiose indie Wintersleep have a record you are going to absolutely love. Someone call Kevin Drew, tell him he can go back to bed.