Sleep

• Genre: Stoner Rock
• Hometown: San Jose

About

The torpid opening chords of Sleep's Holy Mountain (1993) signaled to all that the droning drug rock of Black Sabbath was rearing its ugly head once more. With this album, Sleep usurped from Kyuss the Stoner Rock throne. Though these bong-blasted San Franciscans can induce fatigue at times with their endlessly repeated rhythms and hung-out-on-the-line riffs, these guys are gods to devotees of sky-darkening palls of feedback and down-tuned guitar chug. Their fifty-two-minute-long, one-track album Jerusalem (1999) is by far the band's most ambitious study in restraint. For much of the epic bad-Acid Rock trip, the band lies dormant beneath a mesmerizing din of paranoid doom, suddenly leaping into monster riffs and fierce two-guitar unisons. In every song they record, Sleep descend on listeners with the patience and confidence of vultures scenting death. To some, the advance of their black pinions will sound angelic.

- Chad Driscoll