Easy Sleeper – Queen City Sounds and Art

Easy Sleeper Puts an Upbeat Spin on the Introspective Melodies of Jangle-y Post-punk Single “Feeling Good All the Time”

Easy Sleeper, photo courtesy the artists

Easy Sleeper lays out “Feeling Good All the Time” in what feels like a collage of memory with effective uses of starts and stops. This suits what seems to be the themes of the song which are learning to appreciate the good things and the people in your life and be in the moment and to enjoy life’s little joys without coming to see them as ends I themselves. Musically the sparkling, jangly guitar work and the sometimes charmingly, intentionally rough vocals nearly shouted in moments provide the kind of contrast one hears in a Protomartyr song except that Easy Sleeper favors more ethereal melodies that lend the song an introspective quality that culminates in the beautifully orchestrated tonal bends and swirl to echo at the end of the song. Thus, what could be a paradoxically effervescent, melancholic song ends with an upbeat flourish. Listen to “Feeling Good All the Time” on Spotify and follow Easy Sleeper at the links provided. The group’s new album A Sacred Way of Living releases August 30, 2024.

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Easy Sleeper’s Raucous and Melancholic Jangle Pop Single “Pleasure Thrills” is a Song About Pacing Yourself Instead of Burning Out

Easy Sleeper evokes a a deep sense of melancholic nostalgia and regret on “Pleasure Thrills.” Jangle-y guitar chords ring out with great spirit and then hang and linger accented by a subtle but strong bass line and framed by especially expressive percussion. The vocals weave a story and commentary about how in life there’s a lot of pressure to participate in pretense and competition under the misunderstanding that the choices offered to us are the only ones available and how maybe choosing a different path and way of being might be for the best. Lines like “Two conclusions pick the third one” suggest there’s always a different way of thinking. And the lines asking why you can’t just slow down or shut down instead of chasing after some dubious social reward sound like a call for not making decisions in haste and constantly living life like there’s a finish line. “You’ve only heard of meltdown,” that lyric concisely captures how a lot of people go through life catastrophizing when they crack periodically under their own self-imposed pressure, and who hasn’t at some point in their lives, when that could be bypassed by pacing oneself and forgoing imagined potential glory. The title may have another meaning completely but it fits how a life lived in bipolar fashion can seem exciting and fun but at what cost? Musically the song is reminiscent of 2000s indie pop and the kind of underground power pop that informed it with intricate melodies and raw yet tender moods. Listen to “Pleasure Thrills” on Spotify and follow Easy Sleeper at the links below. Look for the band’s next record due out in the fall.

Easy Sleeper on TikTok

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Easy Sleeper’s “Timekeeper” Highlights the Ways Our Internalized Regulation of Time Negatively Impacts Our Quality of Life

The breezy guitar jangle of the opening of Easy Sleeper’s “Timekeeper” suggests the song may be about some nostalgic portrait of a poignant earlier time in life. But the guitar work is soon joined by vocals that seem a little strained and at points punctuating the chorus with shouted lines because the song is about the pressure time exerts on all our lives from the time we’re forced to be aware of it early in life to the way it regulates the existence of most of us, the conscious awareness and imposed adherence to time tables, from school, work, other obligations, social and otherwise, and in the last third of the song the guitar turns from beautiful and borderline pastoral to distorted and intense like the weight time weighs on us all. After all what could be more demented and destructive than imposing a time of your life at which you’re supposed to accomplish this or that or when you’re an artist the demand for inspiration and creative development as a product that can be reliably produced when so many of our actual timelines are idiosyncratic and not subject to the whims of a marketplace. The fact that the song goes from organic whimsy to anxiety-wracked angularity is a brilliant mirror of life from the childhood of most people to adulthood. There has to be a better way. Listen to “Timekeeper” on Spotify and follow Easy Sleeper at the links provided.

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Easy Sleeper’s Jangle Pop “Dream Prison” is a Gentle But Serious Declaration of Personal Liberation Within

Easy Sleeper couches “Dream Prison” in an energetically delicate melodies. The jangly/twee guitar sounds work together in a fascinating way in which the rhythm line of the guitar is intertwined with the lead in mutually supportive dynamics allowing the vocals to shine across the whole song while leaving the space in the last third of the song for the bass to accent the fiery and warping twin guitar solos. The interplay throughout the song is subtle but evocative and even though the lyrics seem like a gentle but serious declaration of personal liberation beginning with freeing one’s own psyche of the thoughts and internalized narratives that keep you from living as full a life as you can the structure and emotional coloring of the song makes that process seem easily attainable. The lead vocals are Andy Partridge-esque and the music reminiscent of Nonsuch period XTC while resonating with the style of current jangle shoegazers like Moodlighting, DIIV and Letting Up Despite Great Faults. Listen to “Dream Prison” on YouTube and follow Easy Sleeper at the links below.

Easy Sleeper on TikTok

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Easy Sleeper’s “Access Reply” is Like the Early Rebellious Musings of a Corporate Cog

Easy Sleeper set an unusual scene in “Access Reply” with the musings of what sounds like a cog in a corporate bureaucracy lamenting his fate in the dull end of the legal department. Guided along this path of middle American mediocrity by slinky guitar dynamics and melancholic atmospherics that almost sound sardonic in tone. Twee guitar floats into passages of playful introspection at times and helps to establish a borderline surreal tone like the theme music for the life of Griffin Dunne’s character Paul Hackett in After Hours (1985) in his everyday life when he’s not bumping into weirdos in a single night of adventure in an otherwise bland and predictable existence as a computer data entry worker at a time when that still might pay well. Musically it sounds like what Protomartyr or Pavement might do if they decided to take Patrick Bateman’s love of beige 80s pop seriously for the purposes of writing a song commenting on being a corporate drone rebelling in the ways one can and still hold down a “real” job. The line in this song that serves as a chorus “I just whisper and I’m wistful, then I hinder and I’m wasteful” really gives you a peek into the head space of the subject of the song. Maybe that hindering and being wasteful is the least dramatic form of rebellion but one that begins by speaking softly and fantasizing at least a little about the possibility of a more fulfilling life. Listen to “Access Reply” on YouTube and follow Easy Sleeper at the links below.

Easy Sleeper on TikTok

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Wizard Death Teams Up With Easy Sleeper For the Ambient Post-Rock Chiller Track “we watched the sunset (through the window to the studio)”

Wizard Death/Easy Sleeper, photo courtesy the artists

Wizard Death is lo-fi, ambient hip-hop project of Alex Lubeck who featured his indie rock band Easy Sleeper on the song with the Boards of Canada-esque title “we watched the sunset (through the window to the studio).” The downtempo pace of the song allows its tones to ring out warmly as a simple synth arpeggio traces its own pace like like it’s accenting the overall rhythm. The guitar and bass give the otherwise ethereal song a textural grounding that works to not just create a great, languid and soothing mood but a depth of sound that is impossible to pigeonhole to a specific genre of music. It could be an ambient track, it could be a super chill hip-hop beat that would work well for a song that starts off with casual observations that follows those thoughts into deeper places. Either way, the relatively short song is evocative in its deceptive simplicity giving it repeated listenability on its own terms. Listen to the song on Spotify and connect with Wizard Death at the links provided.