Sleepy Sun

Sleepy Sun

&

WOODEN SHJIPS

Plus CARLTON MELTON

Sleepy Sun is an apt title for this young San Francisco sextet, as their debut record, Embrace, is one of those rare slabs of rock and roll that will wake you up in the morning, and send you off to sleep at night. After honing their craft in the occult influenced creative community of Santa Cruz, the band has continued to grow, both creatively and in their loyal following, since their relocation to the city by the bay. With their throbbing rhythm section, swirling sea of guitars, and dreamy, haunting duet vocals, the word dynamic is a severe understatement. Though the press is quick to rifle off a laundry list of rock's greatest ghosts to describe their sound, one live show is all you need to know Sleepy Sun have stumbled upon something very much their own. Having performed their raw, high energy show on stages shared with acts such as Howlin' Rain, Earth, Dead Meadow, and Citay, they are quickly establishing themselves as a very tough act to follow. Fans at shows are known for shouting the band's battle cry, Let's get weird. If the group continues down their rapid road to success, things are about to get very weird indeed.

San Francisco's enigmatically named Wooden Shjips play a minimal, droning brand of garage-styled psychedelia with a noticeable '60s Krautrock influence. The band's vocals slip beneath waves of throbbing minimal rhythms, while fuzz tone guitar and shrieking organs jump to the foreground. When bandleader Ripley Johnson assembled the group in 2003, he wasn't interested in playing gigs or becoming famous; rather, his original intention was to find a group of non-musicians for the purposes of creating innovative music. The idea was that untrained players would have a brand new outlook on music and could bring something fresh to the table, perhaps a blend of the often noisy trance rock of the Velvet Underground and the frenetic mania of the one-hit wonder garage punks of the early '60s.