THE SLEEP OF MONSTERS PRODUCES REASON

Having kick-started 2013 by opening for HIM on New Year’s Eve at Helldone Festival, Helsinki, the Sleep of Monsters have truly arrived with their debut album Produces Reason, released in October in Finland by Suomen Musiikki. Chock-full of radio-friendly yet still spine-tinglingly witty, snotty, and deathly melodic mélange of acidic rock, cadaverous crooning, and Pink Floyd -type siren choirs, it is an album that many already count as one of the top debuts of the year.

In a way, it’s no surprise, as these guys are no novices: vocalist and lyricist Ike Vil was the morose mastermind behind the lauded death rockers and occult rock pioneers Babylon Whores (with two subsequent “Album of the Month” titles in e.g. Terrorizer magazine), guitarist and main songwriter Sami Hassinen was the guitarist of Blake (featured e.g. in Bam Margera’s Viva La Spring Break TV show), drummer Pätkä Rantala played on HIM’s million-selling debut, and keyboardist Janne Immonen has toured extensively with Waltari and Ajattara. The sound of SOM is completed by the guitar wizardry of Uula Korhonen and the thumping bass of Mäihä, who also handles backing vocals, and last but not least, on selected tracks, amplified by the witchy voices of their own “Furies”: Hanna Wendelin, Nelli Saarikoski and Tarja Leskinen.

Recorded at EastSound Studios in Helsinki by producer Pekka “Splendid” Laine (LAB, 45 Degree Woman), Produces Reason offers ten sticky, sweetly bitter and artfully accessible songs. Yes, Vil plays with words and twists Goya to contrive that title, and the well-read will be aroused by the vocalist’s impish bastardizations of Samuel Coleridge, Carl Gustav Jung or obscure German texts. But one needn’t be bookish to feel the warm cloak of SOM’s iridescent ambience, the enveloping swath of deep purples and shadowy greys and midnight black.


Facebook: www.facebook.com/sleepofmonsters
Booking: www.redberg.fi
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“Last night, you dreamt of things fearful and feverish. You dreamt of flying or fornicating, of kings of mountains and anthills, of your teeth cracked and crumbling and tumbling from your maw, of faeries fanciful, of fanged and winged daemonia. You fed and befriended the gryphon, or you screamed and ran from it. Awakened, you strained to recall even echoes of those images, and you either brushed them off as inconsequentialities or clung to the cobwebs tight like a spider. For some, from the nightly coma awaken these beasts. Lovers and dreamers will soak in their alchemical brew, heads and hearts roused, for love and death and the fretful fears and chimerical reveries of somnolent hallucination are the stuff of the Sleep of Monsters.”
(John Serba)