Secret Candy Rock 2026
Songs For The Sleeping
Amassing the strands of adventurous spirit, Massachusetts ensemble reach for optimistic horizon.
The world has moved on since Seth Goodman and his friends set out their stall of reveries on the pandemic landscape and let "In A Vigil State" be the protective bubble against bad tidings. However, the world’s been moving somewhat sideways after that album was out, rather than shifting to any better place, and this is why pieces of the Boston combo’s fifth longplay deal with the new reality in the only way possible – with a smile on, leaving the false brave face for lesser mortals to sport. “In a dream of a dream of a dream I was trapped in my truth again”: here’s a haunting line to signal the switch from sleepwalking to wakefulness and lead the listener, as always puzzled with regard to the collective’s genre, out of the gloom and towards the light.
Not for nothing this record begins with the upbeat “Sing A New Morning” where acid-searing guitar and swaggering bass lay the groundwork for Goodman’s mellifluous voice to open a euphoric vista full of arresting imagery; nor coincidentally it’s brought to a close with a spaced-out-country mini-epic “Now I’m Going Home” where riffs reign supreme. There’s an entire journey-in-a-day vibe to the flow whose gist “Aventurine” gives the form of a scintillating, yet wondrously understated, psychedelia, and the handclaps-abetted “I’m Being Called” propels to a pop-plane.
But while the latter track’s Sisyphus’s fatigue may seem poetic, the unexpectedly bluesy delight of “Savior” will feel rather cynical, and while the twangy swirl of the retro-prog “Creature” sucks in the murk to turn nightmare into cosmic bliss, the faux-symphonic balladry of “The Sun Is Stranger” comes across as simply sublime. So sail past the folk-informed smoldering that “The Knowing” projects, and follow the cinematic, glam-smeared “Black Rivers” to the hope-hiding glow of tomorrow: this is the spot “Songs For The Sleeping” aim for,
****1/2
