Sunday, January 20, 2013

Sleep - Live at Kennel Club - 2-22-1994 - San Francisco, CA


1) Intro
2) From Beyond
3) Dopesmoker
4) Aquarian

"We're Sleep, and we like NyQuil."

'From Beyond' is one of my favorite Sleep tracks and yeah, it sounds great when you are definitely high, but the best part of the track here is the second half, which starts in just before the 11-minute mark - powerful, hard riffage leading into a great solo. Here, Pike really nails it - one of the better solos I have heard from him. Both Al and Matt sound great and distinct and the Green Matamp thing is most definitely happening.

'Dopesmoker' is again the early version and its actually a great version on its own. Some of the riffs that ended up on the record are there in their infancy, and the song definitely feels unfinished and kind of dies at the end. 'Aquarian' is also killer, with Al in full voice and you can feel the power with which they are playing - slow and loud and backed up by some amazing tone.

The crowd is decently enthusiastic, but sounds sparse - what sounds like 20 people. You can almost hear individual people in between songs.

It's amazing to think of them at this time as Holy Mountain was out and doing well, but they were still mostly an underground phenomenon.

3 comments:

  1. I have an extremely damaged ( very bad audio) and video sometimes cuts out + focus problems of a concert Sleep played in Netherlands with Cathedral. I have about 15 minutes video footage of Cathedral and about 12 minutes footage of Sleep. Audio cuts in and out the video is out of focus for about half of Sleep's set.

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  2. Audio problems makes the setlist hard to hear but Holy Mountain is played and I think scourge. The video is still on 8mm mini vhs tape :)

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  3. Hey my man - if you can, shoot me your address in a comment (I won't publish it) and we can work something out! Would love to get a copy of that. :) :)

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