Sleep played Brooklyn Masonic Temple again (pics)

September 10, 2010

Sleep night 1 photos by Greg Cristman
A Storm of Light/Lichens by BBG, Sleep night 2 by Justina Villanueva

Sleep (by Justina Villanueva)
Sleep

Sleep played their second and final show at Brooklyn Masonic Temple on Wednesday (9/8, first show was two days earlier), this time with an assist from A Storm of Light and Lichens. As with the previous night, support was fantastic though in much different ways. A Storm of Light featured Zohra Atash (Religious To Damn) on vocals, new drummer RJ from US Christmas, and Will Lindsay (Indian, Wolves In The Throne Room) on second guitar, which added tremendous depth to the already massive sound that the band has cultivated and on the PA at the Masonic Temple, it only sounded larger. Lichens followed, and although technical difficulties truncated Rob Lowe’s set to a paltry 15+ minutes, his vocal and primitive synth harmonies were enthralling in those brief moments. Excellent set.

Thirty minutes earlier than the night before, Sleep launched into their set with the opening bars of “Dopesmoker”.

Your primary document tonight is 1993’s Sleep’s Holy Mountain, a churning monolith wherein tunes like “Aquarian” change tempo and velocity in a real casual, nonchalant way, a nice balance of dirge and thrash, narcotics and histrionics. “Traveling toward the atomic sky!” Cisneros growls on “Inside the Sun,” and verily you soon feel like you’re standing in it yourself. (The Brooklyn Masonic Temple remains a fantastic place to hear these bands, your Sunn O)))s and Mastadons and Neuroses, thanks to the high ceilings, the grimy feel, the liberal approach to volume, the conservative approach to stage lighting, the words “Masonic” and “Temple.”) The miniseries-length “From Beyond” is like a portable natural disaster, ebbing and flowing, a super-brooding trudge that powers down to a soft, almost gentle interlude (Roeder tapping cymbals with his bare hands) and then inevitably supernovas into an extinction-level event, with Pike’s wildest and most eruptive solo of the night as punctuation. The cops didn’t even bother showing up to gawk at this one, most likely because they were completely terrified. Their loss, your hearing loss. -[Village Voice]

A second set of pictures from night one, as well as more pics from night two are below….

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